- 'l.'l^ 








I'JL 2 1«I7 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

V "c ^ ^^ **■ 

©]^jtjt. ©tij^i'i^y !f jj*. 

Shelf .S--17.P? 

^ ^s-^? 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



k-tf 



'tii' 



!'J 



PROSE PASTORALS 



PROSE PASTORALS 



BY 



SYL 



HERBERT MILTON SYLVESTER 



vx 






" He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the 
ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to 
come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man." 

Emekson, Nature. 




BOSTON 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

211 C^rcmont Street 

1887 






Copyright, 1887, 
By H. M. SYLVESTER. 



A// rights reserved. 



PRESS OF HENRY H. CLARK & CO., BOSTON. 



This book 
is i<ovingi.y dedicated 

^0 ms iHbotber, 

WITH THE HOPE THAT SHE, AS WELL AS OTHERS WHOM I 

KNEW IN MY YOUNGER DAYS, MAY SEE IN ITS 

HOMELY LINES SOME TRIBUTE TO THE 

OLD HOME LIFE AND ITS HAPPY 

INFLUENCES WHICH MADE 

MY BOYHOOD ONE OF SUCH CHARMING 

REMINISCENCES. 




PREFACE. 



|0 apology is offered for writing tliese 
Pastorals, or for putting tliem before 
the public in their present form. When 
they were written the author had no 
thought of making a book. What they 
may be to others he does not know, but to 
himself they are homely transcripts from 
Nature's pages, gathered here and there, 
as commonplace as much that goes to make 
up Nature's every-day moods. 

The title to a book is like a door-plate: 
it tells who may be found within, and noth- 
ing more. To know the dwellers well, one 
must step inside, — must eat of their salt 
and drink of their " pottle " more than 
once. The author can only invite his 



VI PREFACie. 

readers in to sup at a commonplace table, 
in hope of a better acquaintance in days 
to come. So tbe title for this volume is 
hardly more than the pitch-note of a song 
the reader is to sing for himself, setting 
its words to the never-to-be-forgotten tunes 
stolen from the Thrushes, the Bobolinks, 
and Robins that still haunt the once fa- 
miliar meadows and orchards of a happy 
childhood. 

THE AUTHOR. 

QUINCY, JtTNE I, 1887. 



CONTENTS. 



In thk Firewght . . . • . . . . 9 

OUT1.00KS 17 

Oi<D Acquaintance 27 

Birds of a Feather ...... 41 

Plain Fare 53 

AFTER THE Cows . 67 

A IvOTUs-Eater 79 

H0ME1.Y Sounds 93 

In the Woods 105 

Scare-Crows "7 

Rainy Days • • -131 

Among the Hili^ 151 

I. On the Peabody River 169 

II. Nineteen-Mile Brook 183 

III. On the West Branch 196 

Mists 209 

B1.ACKBERRY-V1NES o 253 



IN THE FIRELIGHT. 



" Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, 

the emotion, the actual condition of his ozvn heart ; and other men, 

so strangely are we all htit together by the tie of sympathy, must 

and will give heed to him." 

Carlyle, Essay on Burns. 



IN THE FIRELIGHT. 



I. 

SiivENT I sit beside my glowing hearth ; 

Without, the bare limbs sway against the sky ; 
Weird, creaking sounds come up along the path, 

Like elfin laughter-song, now low, now high ; 
And as the dull red light begins to wane 

Above the dark line of the wood, — 
The sober, half-regretful mood 

Of a November day, — 
The air is thick with white-winged messengers 
That softly tap against my window-pane 
Their winter reveille. 



12 IN THE FIRELIGHT. 

II. 

The blazing fire-log snaps and roars in glee ; 

The sparks gleam brightly as the shadows fall, 
And in the ruddy, fitful glow I see 

Dark shapes go dancing up and down the wall. 
Across the murky flue above the crane 

Red-coated troops speed to the fray, 
And wavering halt and fade away 

To come again, — 
As hopes, once brilliant, rush on to their goal, 
To turn to dust and ashes for the pain 
They bore in vain. 

III. 

The storm-winds moan their misery and loss 
With gusty, gasping speech, then die away ; 

Above the sleepy eaves the great elms toss 
Their naked, brawny arms in sheer dismay ; 

While through the crannies of the casement near, 
With stealthy, noiseless presence creep 

The phantoms of the snow to keep 
Me ghostly company ; 

But like unbidden guests they turn and stop, 

Uncertain, hesitating still, and peer 
At my discourtesy. 



IN THE FIRELIGHT. 1 3 



IV. 



The storm has lulled ; the broad hearth's ruddy blaze 
Has waned ; across the hallway by the stair 

A quaint old timepiece of Colonial days 
With loud yet laggard tick doles out the spare 

And fleeting moments of the weary year, 
And keeps the grotesque brazen dogs — 
Within whose warm embrace Yule-logs 
In far-off days have burned — 

An ancient fellowship, whose memories 

Have grown with time and silence doubly dear 
That centuries have earned. 



My fire bums low ; tne live coals flush and pale ; 

I shut my eyes, and the dull snapping seems 
A low sweet crooning-song, an olden tale 

To bring swift thoughts of boyhood's happy dreams. 
The years fly backward, — backward O so far ! 

It seems but yesterday when Spring 

Brought all her fragrant blossoming 
And promise rare, 
On winds that tinged her cheeks with clover-tints, 
With only fitful April tears to mar 
A face so sweet and fair. 



14 IN THE FIRELIGHT. 



VI. 



Within the shadows of the orchard-trees 
That flank the low-gaped wall beyond the lane 

I hear the plover whistling down the breeze, 
The robins singing in the summer rain ; 

The throstle in the lowlands pipes his notes 
Where brooks with azure quivers hold 

The sun's slant javelins of gold, 
Half-hid in meadow bloom, 

That, tossed by summer winds, seems a bright sea 

Of emerald flecked with flowery boats 
Deep-laden with perfume. 

VII. 

In through the windows of the gable old, 
Looking the misty road the river takes, 

The rounding moon pours floods of pale-hued gold, 
And with a quiet, dreamy splendor breaks 

The raftered gloom ; or on the roof's broad slope 
With drowsy cadence once again 

The low sweet music of the rain 
Lulls me to childish rest; 

And in the morning sun I trudge to school. 

Nor dream there is a world of fairer hope 
Beyond the breezy west. 



IN THE FIRELIGHT. 15 

VIII. 

lu alder-shadowed nooks with patient hand 

I tempt the wary trout, or slowly take 
The hillocked pastures, where the cattle stand 

Knee-deep in quiet painted pools, that make 
The sky's bright picture, for m}^ homeward way. 

Old faces greet me at the door. 

And footsteps sound along the floor 
So silent now and lone, — 
The smoiildering brands fall outward at my feet ; 
My youth was but a dream to fade away, — 
A dream once all my own ! 

IX. 

With face against the frosty pane, I see 

Above the city's stately dome of white 
God's footsteps in the starry mystery, — 

The far-off lustrous prophecy of night, — 
What joy or sorrow do they hold apart? 

My loss may prove my neighbor's gain ; 

His wealth bring me its hoard of pain 
Without the thought ; 
And yet, I have the lasting recompense 
Of happy bygone days within my heart 
With blessed memories fraught. 



OUTLOOKS. 



Life finds its meaniftg in its scope, 

As broad or narrow as its aim, — 
A poor, frail jest, if only hope 

Or untaught hand may feed its flame. 
Dame Nature's school keeps open door, — 
Her novice needs no less, no more, — 
Where long apprenticeship of thought is gain 
Of stouter drawn and larger thrift of brain. 




OUTLOOKS. 

I .o2sa ^jOT long ago I made a visit to an exhibition 
of the Boston Art Club, and being early in 
the day the crowd of art-lovers had not 
made their appearance. One picture by a well- 
known artist attracted my attention. Designated 
in the Catalogue as ' ' Indian Summer, ' ' it had all 
the wondrous spell of tree and stream, of stilly 
haunt, of laughing waters all aglow with amber 
tints of beech and scarlet flame of maples. The 
delicate film of autumn haze and arrowy shaft of 
golden sunlight were faithfully and tenderly repro- 
duced. The superb wealth of drowsy warmth, of 
softened outline, of royal coloring were here, not 
harsh and over-strong, but deftly drawn with brush 
and knife. The quiet pool in the foreground, trans- 
lucent as crystal, was strewn with hints of color as 
if it were the palette of the Supreme Artist. The 
dim, soundless woods were Nature's own cloisters, 
where only the footfall of slow-dropping twig and 
leaf broke the mysterious silences. No doubt the 
hillslopes which must lie just beyond the boundary 
of woods with their newly-ploughed lands were 

19 



20 OUTLOOKS. 

populated with noisy congregations of crows whose 
loud halloos greet the famjer in derision, while 
troops of thieving jays pipe in shrilly notes across 
the wind-blown cornfields the preludes of the com- 
ing snows. The picture is a symphony of color 
and sentiment. I scan the technique from a close 
standpoint, I step backward to get a better and 
different view ; others do the same. And so it is 
with the work that men do, whether with brush 
or pen, with hand or brain, the search is ever for 
that which most appeals to our sympathies and 
desires. With men as with pictures, I find in them 
the same reproductions of Nature, the same divini- 
ties approximately as we expect in the Creator 
after whose ideals they were fashioned. There are 
no needs among men which may not be readily 
supplied. The material is so abundant and lies so 
closely beside our thresholds that we overlook it 
in our wild search elsewhere, until some plodder 
comes along and silently takes the treasure to 
himself, to afterwards dole it out to his neighbors 
with usury. 

It is one of the strange things in the lives of 
men that they find no value or charm in that 
which comes to them without some sort of sacrifice. 
The wild-flower which strews the wayside with 
bright color and makes the air sweet with delicate 
perfume, — delighting the eye with its wonderful 
variety of common violet, shy nodding wind-flower, 



OUTLOOKS. 21 

or broad patches of diminutive bluet (^Houstonia 
cceriilea), that Hke bits of soft blue sky seem to 
have wandered down to earth to revel amid the 
springing grasses of field and roadside, of waxen- 
petalled leatherleaf, the cinquefoil and spiderwort 
of the pasture-ledges, the orchids, mallows of the 
lower lands, — has no charm for those who would 
go into ecstasies over the bizarre beauties of the 
hot-house. Nature is the superior model. Cultiva- 
tion spoils the natural flower. Take its prototype 
in humankind, over-breeding makes a superior, in 
some respects, species at the expense of commoner 
but more needful qualities. The bees that gather 
the sweets of the clover-field teach every-day lessons 
which men would do well to heed. The real good 
in life is in its naturalness. The plain homeliness of 
the old farm-house back among the hills bespeaks 
real comfort, and the plain, homely man who stops 
his team in the furrow to give you a hearty shake 
of the hand, that, barometer-like, shows the wealth 
of prospective hospitality, takes Nature for his 
teacher. Earth is the banker upon whom all his 
drafts of toil are drawn. She is alike his inspiration 
and his pleasure. None are nearer Nature than 
himself : she is his work-table and playground alike. 
The clouds, the winds, the rains and snow tell him 
when to haste and when he may loiter. He is 
barely ever a poet, and even if he is, he is una- 
ware of it ; but he loves Nature for what she affords 



22 OUTIvOOKS. 

him of suggestion. He takes you to the highest 
pinnacle of his farm and shows you his broad acres, 
and all the while his eye glistens and his heart 
heaves with honest pride. He has wrought all 
this, for he tells you of a time when these smooth 
roods of land were covered with dense growths of 
wood and timber ; but that was years ago. He 
takes you to his timber lands and pats the stout 
trunks of pine and spruce affectionately as he tells 
you how many thousand feet of clear lumber this 
or that tree will cut or scale. It is his compensa- 
tion, his meed of success, the outcome of many a 
plan, of watchfulness, and of years of unremitting 
labor. His heart is as large as the outlook from his 
narrow porch-doorway, and within which is framed 
a magnificent picture of real sky and clouds. It 
is his poem by day and his dream by night, this 
farm of his, but when he looks out at morn or 
night it is only to scan the horizon as if to read 
the signs of wet or dry for the coming day, if of 
warm da3^s when the seed should be brushed into 
the ground, brown and mellow from the plough, 
or if, of a " spell of hard weather, ' ' of clear skies 
when it were safe to cut the ripening grain. 

lyabor is the normal condition of living, and for 
the worker there is but little actual poetry. Its 
dreams lie mostly within the realms of sleep, and 
yet the bread of Industry is sweeter than any con- 
fection which Idleness ever rolled under its tongue. 



OUTLOOKS. 23 

The toot of the old tin dinner-horn that sends its 
echoes flying across lots, to the aesthetic ear would 
sound harsh and unmusical, but the bluff plough- 
man catches the homely note as it comes down the 
freshening wind, and he grows a span taller, the 
dull oxen prick up their ears and hasten on to 
the furrow's end, and with the perfection of in- 
stinct, unloosed from the plough or cart, start over 
the hill for the barn while their driver hastens after. 
I have great respect for the young man who holds 
his ambition for city life well under control. Life 
in town may open up a broader sphere of action, 
but it as well has its drawbacks. Men do not find 
themselves so independent where they can so easily 
lose their identity, as in the larger metropolitan 
cities where the subordinate positions are so nu- 
merous and so rapidly filled, but if he does come 
he is like to bring the romance of Ijie country with 
him. 

To forget the fields and orchard bloom in which 
the old homestead is cradled is to forget one's 
paternity, but the disposition is to break away from 
what seem the coarser ruts of labor, to try the 
outer world with its bracing atmosphere of marts 
and factories, its schools and colleges, and from 
whence come the scholars, the scientists, and the 
discoverers, who are to pilot the way in thought 
and development of coming days. The lowness of 
a man's aim is not always to be censured if he hits 



24 OUTLOOKS. 

the mark, if lie makes the most of the material at 
hand. A man's work is al>vays a hint to some- 
thing better. The boy spurns the calloused hand 
of the artisan, the farmer, or the wood-chopper, and 
prefers the dissecting-room or the law office ; not 
because he has not the due respect for work, for 
Muscle, but he believes in Brain. Instinct tells 
him that the province of thought is never spanned, 
and though the bared arm, tanned by exposure to 
wind and sun, is the emblem of the world's worker, 
yet the throbbing brain lends to the bared arm the 
helps of its discoveries and creations. Intelligence 
and labor are the only passports to success. If I 
respect the young man who beautifies the old roof- 
tree by bringing to its shelter some young woman 
who is to aid him in perpetuating the honor of his 
fathers, whose farm- work is in the line of intelligent 
experiment and common sense, I certainly admire 
the other who plunges into the jostling crowd of 
the city, not one of whom seems less eager than 
himself to win the vantage-ground. The world is 
not so great but that a man's fame or dishonor may 
span it in a brief hour. The old ways of living 
have retired beyond the borders of the older settle- 
ments, and steam and electricity hold the keys to 
the world's commerce. The new era is one of 
books and of thought. One nation exchanges its 
commodity with another ; the exchange is carried 
on with mutual profit and with mutual encourage- 



OUTLOOKS. 25 

ment. In human intercourse as in commercial, the 
rule is the same though not so marked, but men 
change thought and opinion as farmers do day's 
works. All good thought, like good coin, has 
current circulation, a purchasing value ; and of all 
true helps to true living none are so rich as the 
heritages of something written or done, left by some 
largely successful man to the world and its posterity. 
Force of example is an unconscious but powerful 
lever. To strengthen the dykes of public opinion, 
the better opinion and morality, is the true mission 
of a man. No one can better himself except he 
better those about him, and if he be a strong, self- 
reliant man, he will soon find himself the leader 
of a large body of his own kind, whether he be a 
ward politician, a thinker, an experimentalist, or a 
financier. 

Scores of men and women go to their work, to 
the counter, the bench, the school and professions, 
day after day with a sort of dogged persistence in 
their strivings to get on in the great brotherhood of 
humanity, and those who lose sight of their earlier 
experiences in life stand least in its chances. It is 
a battle of the strong and the weak, and between 
whom the problem of the survival of the fittest is 
being constantly worked out. It is the race of 
competitive trial in which individual development 
and achievement are the tests, and in which the 
desire for precedence is the spur. Every man is 



26 OUTLOOKS. 

a knight-errant for himself. When people get to 
looking on the universe as, a failure, it is a sure 
proof that such have become failures themselves, 
but the world keeps the score of those who succeed ; 
of those who fail its cold charity makes no mention. 
All men come under some sort of observation ; all 
men are teachers and all may be learners, whose 
record of good or ill is like the printed sheet which 
comes moist from the press every morning. Neigh- 
bors are sometimes mirrors at whom we may look 
to catch reflections of ourselves. If we make the 
rank and file of mankind who plod on with no hope 
or wish for anything better than food or shelter 
from day to day, we are mere burden-carriers, ani- 
mated bundles of muscle and nothing more. Nature 
never intended such fate for men. The rocks were 
made for something else than to be ground into 
cement, the trees for something better than timber 
for ships and houses. L-abor is not all of living, 
and 5^et only work makes life enjoyable ; so Nature 
paints her pictures to be seen of men, lays her 
mountains across the pathways of men that they 
may admire her grandeur and her vastness. Nature 
means never to be forgotten, and strong, rugged as 
she is, ever expanding into new and beautiful forms, 
she is the perfect type of living as she is the gift 
of the Divine Intelligence. She is the handmaid 
of Brain, the teacher of Mankind. 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 



With the blushing of the maples, 
Peering through the falling rain. 

Come the sprites of bud and blossom, 
And the days of sofig again. 

By the margin of the river 

Nods the catkin'' s yelloiv plume I 

All the streets of Sufishine drifting 
Full of snowy apple-bloom. 




OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

AM never quite alone in the woods. I 
feel that the trees are watching me with a 
hundred eyes, and are waiting with listen- 
ing ears to hear what I shall say to them or to 
myself. One is never alone ; the great Over Soul 
is here as elsewhere. Here are myriad voices. 
Here Growth and Decay are the superior activities, 
as they have been for centuries. Here the Speech 
of the Wind is akin to the Music of the Spheres. 
Here Nature has found her perfect expression. No, 
I am not alone, but I am not abashed as I stand 
in the dim cloisters of the woods, for these trees 
were the playmates of my childhood. I know all 
the trees about the old farm as I do individuals, 
and I feel like shaking their drooping boughs as I 
would shake the hand of a dear friend or acquaint- 
ance. I put my cheek to their rough barks, and 
there is a sort of sympathy that comes to me in 
return : I feel that the trees appreciate my greeting, 
and I am satisfied ; yet they are simply trees, but 
each seems to have an individual memory. 

29 



30 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

Here are hoary beeches that were old with cen- 
turies before I knew them, and there is scarce one 
of their big, gray, gnarled bodies that does not 
bear an initial or mark of some sort of my own or 
of some of my boyhood's companions, and which 
the growing years have distorted into rude hiero- 
glyphics on their swelling rinds. I have no difficulty 
in deciphering these characters so long ago graven 
with a boy's jackknife. I slowly spell them out; 
the woods are filled with voices and boyish laughter. 
How the echoes ring ! The cows browse along the 
margin of the woods. I hear the twigs break under 
their heavy tread, and the quick snort of the restive 
colts as I come upon them unawares. Here comes 
a troop of jays ; one lights on the topmost limb 
above me while the others keep on with short, jerky 
flights. The one above me wears the same old 
blue coat, and his voice has not improved one whit. 
The squirrels bark and scamper over the leaves, or 
sit perched high among the pine boughs, making 
with their sharp teeth tiny chips of the long pine- 
cones. A chipmunk, a species of smaller squirrel 
marked with lateral stripes of black and brownish- 
yellow, hugs close to an old hemlock log, keeping 
one bright eye on myself and one on his hole in 
the ground. I hear the young crows complaining 
in their nest in the thick hemlock tops, and the 
sharp report of a gun not far away increases their 
tumult. No, I am not alone, for the boy of a 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 31 

generation ago is here with me. Only myself am 
grown old. How vivid the Imagination ! Years 
count for nothing, for here is perennial youth. 

The cattle have kept the old path to the spring, 
with its gaunt, scrawny apple-tree above it, which 
every autumn hangs full of bitter-tasting, red- 
cheeked apples for the entertainment of the crows 
and gray squirrels, and an ancient birch, grown a 
little stouter perhaps with age, which has many 
a time lent me a strip of bark for a drinking-cup, 
— a silver drinking-cup with an old-gold lining, — 
overtops the pigmy fruit-bearer. This spring was a 
favorite with the haymakers when the Jul}^ heats 
fell along the slopes above the woodland, and many 
a time have I filled a brown earthen jug with its 
crj^stal sweets and carried it into the fields to hide 
it under the cool side of a fragrant ha3^cock or in 
the shadows of the hedge by the broad-topped wall. 
I mark the latter place by a tall hardback bush, 
where a yellow spider has spun an enormous web 
of gossamer which is held stoutly in place by strong 
doubled and twisted threads from the spider's loom, 
which radiate outward from a common centre with 
almost geometrical exactness. Over this curiously 
fashioned network of filmy lines and angles were 
often strown bright beads of dew long after the 
wet had dried off the grass and stubble. I mark 
the place further by its being in the deep shadow 
of a sugar pear-tree whose fruit was early turning 



32 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

purple in the midsummer sun. The bobolinks 
indulge in great merriment as I go under the 
cherry-trees with my shining burden, and sing at 
the top of their voices, — 

" Brown jug, brown jug. 
See it glisten, see it glisten, 
He, he, he!" 

and it used to make the mowers laugh as they 
kissed its dusky lips. 

Through the narrow vista of low scrubby pines I 
get a glimpse of an old sugar-camp. These pine- 
lands were years ago favorite feeding-grounds for 
the partridges when they were strown with crimson 
plums from the thorn-bushes which then grew here 
luxuriant^, and with my gun on my arm I push 
through the low bushes to the ruins of the sugar- 
camp. The flat rocks, oblong-shaped and sharp- 
cornered, gleaned from the pasture ledges, which 
held the great kettles in place as they swung in 
chains from a stout pole spiked firmly at each end 
to heavy posts set deep in the ground, wear coats 
of vivid green plush ; the charred sticks and black 
coals, quenched so long ago, half buried under a 
3'ellow drift of pine-needles, look up with a sombre 
friendliness. The crotched stakes which supported 
the rude rafters with their thatch of rough boards, 
thickly covered with pine and hemlock boughs, 
have fallen flat in their decay, but the stalwart 



OIvD ACQUAINTANCE. 33 

pines are here and sing the same lullabys when 
their tops are stirred by the winds. 

Here is a score of burlj^ sugar-maples, with thick- 
Hmbed tops, and knee-high about their corrugated 
trunks are the weazened auger-holes where I have 
driven many a whittled spile or sap-spout. There 
is a great difference in the way the sap of the maple 
begins its flow. One tree hardly waits for the 
auger to be pulled from the tree before its sweets 
pour outward, a gushing stream, and the spile is 
driven quickly in and the trough put in position 
to catch the treasure ; another maple will hold back 
its tide of sap for minutes after its side is pierced, 
to finally come with a slow drip-drip as if the drops 
were being squeezed from the roots by some great 
force. Generosity and niggardliness are as much 
the quality of the sugar- tree as of one's neighbors. 
Here are the sapling pine-troughs under the trees, 
untouched since their overturning at the close of 
the season of which I write. I tip one of them 
over and a striped snake glides away into the leaves 
and thick underbrush. I make no effort to detain 
the fellow. I rather admire his beauty and brilliant 
markings ; I have no enmity for harmless things. 
The better I know Nature, the less aversion I have 
for her creeping things, and the sooner the world 
gets to looking in the same direction the better 
it will be for humanity. Nothing exists without 
a purpose, and who shall question that Infinite 



34 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

purpose? I have spent many nights here under 
the bright stars of March with only the owls and 
ni}^ roaring fires to keep me company. An owl 
will fill the night woods with sonorous echoes with 
a single blast of his trumpet. 

" Hoo, hoo-o-hoo-o o, hoo-o ! " 

he shouts, and there seems to be an owl in every 
tree. I shout in return, and the reply comes still 

nearer 

" Hoo-lioo-oo-hoo oo ! " 

cutting a note or two short in his hasty courtesy. 
I often wondered if the light of my fire was any 
easier to his eyes than the glare of the sunlight, 
for like an old-fashioned lover, his owlship came 
at the same hour every night and never went till 
morning. 

The winds change suddenly and the camp is 
filled with dense smoke, but a moment later a new 
current takes it swiftly upward through the boughs 
of the hemlocks and pines. The sap in the kettles 
hisses and sputters as it boils up against their hot 
sides, and clouds of steam float away into the dark- 
ness like wraiths, disembodied spirits, or whatever 
the imagination might conjure up of ghostly shape, 
and about midnight an uncanny feeling creeps over 
me, for I remember all the ghost-stories which 
were ever told me, but I get out into the breeze, 
the raw March wind, prickly with frost-needles, 



OIvD ACQUAINTANCE. 35 

and poke my fears into the fire. How the dry 
pine-wood crackles and roars, and the sparks, how 
brilliant they are, as they go scuriying into the 
thick foliage, looking like so many stars amid the 
tree-tops. When the smoke drifts down low into 
the swamp, the sky is full of stars and calm. The 
same sky looks down through the trees to-day. 

The sap-spouts or spiles were whittled out during 
the long winter evenings in the light of the pine- 
knot blaze, with the shadows dancing up and down 
the walls taking grotesque forms, and to keep them 
company I used to make queer-looking shapes of 
shadowy heads with my hands, working mj^ fingers 
to give them semblance of animation. On the old- 
fashioned mantel-piece, so high I could reach it 
only by standing in the low basket-bottomed chairs, 
the little square clock kept note of the hours, and 
back a bit from the open fire, with its smutty-nosed 
tea-kettle hung midway on the slender crane, 
singing in high-pitched key, the wide-rimmed spin- 
ning-wheel kept up a vibrant bass to the tea-kettle's 
song the whole evening through. As the March 
sun rides higher up the sky, an exploring expedi- 
tion is made to the woods to see if the snow is 
thawing about the feet of the maples. When the 
snow begins to melt away from their roots it is 
time to get out the spiles and to tap trees. The 
long sled is shovelled out of the drifts piled up by 
the big blow which ushered in this blustering 



36 OI,D ACQUAINTANCE. 

month, and with the oxen yoked to the well-loaded 
sled and its paraphernalia of the sugar-camp and 
sugar-maker, the start is made over the hill along 
the drifted trail of the winter wood-road. The 
wind blows freshly, full of bracing cold from the 
White Hills fifty or sixty miles away, as the crow 
flies, across the valley to the westward, and the 
crust made by the last rain glitters like cloth-of- 
diamonds in the sun. The oxen slump here and 
there, leaving stains of blood on the white snow, 
but in the woods the crust is not so stiff and sharp, 
and the oxen answer the goad-stick more readily, 
and are less hesitating in their movements. The 
roads to the trees were ' ' swamped ' ' the fall pre- 
vious, yet the first drive around is a tedious journey 
through the snow, often hip-deep and untrodden 
as it is. From the sled-road trails are struck out 
on all sides to the sap-trees, leaving at each tree 
its allotment of spile and trough. Tapping trees 
is slow work, and one's arms grow wearied with 
so much twisting and boring ; but the first step has 
to be taken, and in sugar-making this is about the 
easiest. One spile is put into each of the smaller 
trees while two and three are driven into the larger, 
and with the troughs put in position the sugar- 
maker has only to gather the run night and morn- 
ing. A large molasses-hogshead has been procured 
from the groceiy at the Four Corners, engaged of 
the trader in the autumn before, — for there is 



OLD ACOUAINTANCB. 37 

always a good market for empty hogsheads in the 
country ; a hole large enough to admit a water-pail 
is cut into its staves, when it is securely chained 
to the cross-bars of the sled, and the tour is thus 
made ; the sled groaning and squeaking as it twists 
about the stumps and over the boulders scattered 
along the way. From the main avenue sinuous 
paths, narrow single trails, reach out into the gray 
vistas of sapling growth ; up and down among the 
runs and hollows go the men in their red shirt- 
sleeves, for through these slippery alleys of the 
snow the sap has to be carried in pails to the sleds, 
and the men are glad when the last tree is visited, 
when the team is headed for the fires. But these 
are not the only sap-gatherers, for the chickadees 
and woodpeckers are great sap-topers. How care- 
fully the teamster coaxes his mottled oxen over 
the rough road with his liquid burden ! A sudden 
stopping or pitching of the sled throws showers 
of sap-spray into the air; and though it is nothing 
but sap, the sweetwater of the maple, it represents 
to the sugar-maker a deal of hard work, so he gets 
as much of his treasure into camp as he can. It 
is when the nights are freezing cold and the days 
are bright and warm that the team is busiest, and 
if a light snowfall has come over night the next 
day will be a " sap-driver. ' ' 

With the sugar-maker a watched pot boils best. 
The kettles are to. be kept full and the fires as well 



38 OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 

urged to their hottest glow. On no account must 
the boiUng sap overflow, nor must the ever-thicken- 
ing syrup get too shallow in the kettles, and when 
the ' ' syrup ' ' point is reached all the kettles are 
emptied into one, and under which the fires are 
slowed down and the utmost watchfulness is be- 
stowed upon it. An egg well-beaten is thrown in 
to purify the hot syrup, and the impurities, quickly 
driven to the surface, are skimmed off as fast as 
they appear. A bit of snow-crust and a ' ' sampling 
spoon " tell the story, — " Done," when the bailing 
and straining of the amber sweets into the kegs is 
begun. The work of '' sugarhig-off" is an opera- 
tion requiring still more care. - Oftentimes, just 
before the ''graining'' stage is reached, the boj^s 
and girls of the neighborhood turn out for a visit 
to the sugar-camp, to see the sugar-makers and to 
feast on that rare confection of their make, known 
in the native dialect as ' ' stick-chops ' ' ; and rightly 
named it is. But the season is generally a short 
one, the road through the woods grows bare in 
spots ; the sun rides higher still ; the slopes are 
clear of snow ; and at last the sap has done its 
running, and we look up into the trees, into their 
ruddy tops, and spring has really come. 

These moss-covered rocks and drifts of yellow 
needles, with the dead rain-bleached coals heaped 
athwart the old dismantled fireplace where the 
big iron kettles once hung in stout chains, and the 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 39 

decaying timbers of this, once upon a time, March 
inn of the maple woods, are like Runic inscriptions 
written amid pillars of stately pines and over their 
brown floors, and are to be deciphered only by one 
who has carried in his heart for years the golden 
key by which their mysteries are unlocked. Their 
rude lines grow into rare sketches and woodland 
story; but as I leave them to seek the uplands 
where the farmer is carting his rich compost upon 
the brown ploughed lands, and where the men are 
at work to the jo3^ous accompaniment of rare bird- 
music, with the green world at my feet, they fade 
slowly out in the sunshine that falls so softly across 
the lap of May. It is a lasting pleasure that comes 
to one who makes 

"His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome." 

Nor is there any taint of alloy in the gold of his 
content who finds in Nature's unnamed, unsur- 
veyed highways of the woods and fields, — 

"Where his clear spirit leads him, there his road 
By God's own light illumined and foreshowed." 



BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 



Life's recompense is doubly rich : 

Duty well done brings the fair fame 
That 'j won amid Life's quiet ways 

In emulation of His name. 
More lasting than the peace of Earth 
Is that from sources far above 
Earth'' s discontent ; — the Over heart, 
The broad, deep fou>itain of God's love. 



BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 




AM reminded by some people I have 
known of the kingbirds that once haunted 
the orchard slopes of the old country home- 
stead, and I have a prejudice against them which 
I have never been able to overcome. Perched upon 
the topmost bough of some apple-tree, with a self- 
conscious and perky air, the kingbird jerks out 
his rasping note which sounds like the rough scrap- 
ing of a violin-string, thrown out at uncertain 
intervals, never approaching the hint of a song at 
its best, a moment later to sweep downward into 
the blushing red clover-blossoms after the most de- 
licious morsel of the field, the honey-bee, or else to 
go tilting after some favorite songster of ours that 
has unfortunately attracted this insolent' s atten- 
tion, and whose presence within his domain is to 
the kingbird an unpardonable offence. The king- 
bird is the self-constituted special policeman about 
the old farmhouse without pay, but he takes his 
remuneration, as some grown people do, sub rosa. 

After one of these short flights the kingbird 
returns to his perch, and from which sentinel-like 

43 



44 BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 

he overlooks his domain in silence. But what a 
marauder he is among the honey-gatherers ! In 
some localities he is better known as the bee-martin; 
but whether he goes under one name or another, 
he is entitled to the dislike of his feathered neigh- 
bors, and his shrill twitter is no less discordant 
nor less disliked. Crows and hawks give the 
premises a wide berth wherever the kingbird has 
chosen his domicile, — more, I apprehend, from a 
well-bred dislike to such quarrelsome dispositions 
as his is, than from any feeling of cowardice. 
I^arger than the bluebird, he is of like pugnacious 
character, conducting himself with true Jacksonian 
spirit, believing that the victor should take to him- 
self the spoils. He is the Dick Turpin of the airy 
highways, the gentleman of the road, the bully of 
the orchard tree-tops. He is readj^ to run a muck 
with anything that grows feathers or that flies. 
Throw a stick or a stone at the fellow, and after a 
narrow circle or two down he alights with a saucy, 
careless action, as provoking as it is indescribable, 
on the topmost spur of the selfsame apple-tree, 
and there he swings in the wind and sun to his 
heart's content until you have disturbed him again, 
or until some bird comes in sight, when he is off 
for a chase or another fight. Like all the family of 
Fly-catchers, he is always on the alert for his game, 
which, sportsmanlike, he always takes a-wing. 
My admiration for the bluebird is not much 



BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 45 

greater. The poets may say all the pretty things 
they please of him, but his appearance in the early 
days of spring is the beginning of a season of heart- 
burnings among the martins and other miniature 
housekeeping birds. His early movements ever 
remind me of the man who invariably forecloses 
his mortgage at the first breaking of its condition 
by taking possession. The bluebird is great on 
the foreclosing process ; that branch of bird-law 
must have been his special study. If he finds a 
martin-house empty he pre-empts at once, and if 
he finds the martins are ahead of him he will worry 
them out of the neighborhood after a season or two 
of persecution. If the bluebird once gets his eye 
on a good location, like the real estate speculator, 
it is his in time by hook or crook. The little fellow 
may be very inspiring as he hops along the fences, 
his blue coat contrasting with a refreshing bright- 
ness against the ploughed lands brown and bare, 
and the dead stubble of the fields in the opening 
spring daj'S, and the moist winds of showery April 
are not fresher with promise of swelling foliage and 
bursting bloom than he, 

" Flyiug before from tree to tree," 

yet I always think of him as a heartless robber and 
a despoiler of other people's homes. Years ago, 
when I was a youth, my father built for me a bird- 
house, — a dainty little church, with miniature 



46 BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 

Steeple and long windows at the sides, with hooded 
portico and columns, and with fit ceremony it was 
set up at the end of the long wood-house on its 
white-painted support, and dedicated to the martins. 
The snows had gone, the leaves on the oaks were 
hardl}^ thinking of bursting their buds, and the 
martins came one April morning with the sun, — a 
whole colonj^ of them, taking possession without 
ado. What a busy season it-was with them ! They 
held their conventions on the long ridge-pole of the 
barn below the highway, and from their chatter and 
the unanimity of their action I thought them to 
be very clever reasoners, and a ver>'- sensible bird 
people. The nests were soon built and their domes- 
tic life had begun. As far away as those days now 
are, I can see the broad lawn sparkling with morn- 
ing dew and yellow dandelion disks crossed and 
recrossed with the network of their shadows, and 
with many a delicate tracery of curve and line as 
these neighbors of mine flew thickly and at random 
across the bright sunbeams. What a chorus of 
strong, robust voicings was theirs! Many a morning 
did I stop to listen to their pen, peu, pen, a strong 
musical note of much vibrant quality, as I went 
down the path on my way to the old brick school- 
house at the Corners. He was not unaware of the 
tyrannical disposition of the kingbird, for I noticed 
that the)' never met without a combat; yet I no- 
ticed that the martin never sought the quarrel, and 



BIRDS OP A FEATHER. 47 

was much the more dignified of the two. I much 
admired his braver>% for no more alert guardian of 
the poultry lived about the farm than this purple- 
coated songster, and the poultry had erelong 
learned the note which sounded the near approach 
of the predatory hawk, and upon hearing it would 
scurry to cover with the utmost speed. Ever>'- 
where this beautiful bird wins the friendship of the 
fanner.- But with the first frosts in the lowlands 
they would go away, and without warning, or hardly 
a good-by; and well I remember the silent, lonely 
days when the little church was deserted. Winter 
came and went as all winters do, and as the martins 
went so they came, for on another bright morning 
in another April there they were circling joyously 
about the old home as if they had never been away, 
and among them I seemed to recognize my old 
acquaintances of the previous summer, with the 
south-winds blowing the dandelions into tiny disks 
of gold, strewing the fields with their brilliant 
blossoms. The martins and myself grew up to- 
gether and never were better friends. The sleek, 
gloss}^ coats of these fellows shone in the sun like 
burnished ebony touched with purple, and how 
proud I grew to be of them ! for they were known 
for the wide circuit of two towns, and were the 
subject of much envy in the hearts of some of my 
youthful companions. After some ten years of 
out-going and in-coming I noticed one early spring 



48 BIRDS OI^ A FEATHER. 

day a trio of bluebirds inspecting the property, 
but before they had succeeded in their scheme of 
usurpation the old dwellers had returned and were 
in full possession. A few days later the bluebirds 
had returned in larger force and the siege was be- 
gun that lasted three years. The first year the 
bluebirds were hardly more than meddlesome, and 
the martins held their ground ; the second year 
the bluebirds were occupying the rear end of the 
church, and that fall the martins went away never 
to occupy their old home again, for when the}^ had 
returned the next spring they found the little 
church covered with the pugnacious meddlers of 
the two previous years, and disgusted, evidently, 
they went away never to return. From that 
day to this, as far as I know, not a martin has 
been seen about the old home place. I spent a 
limited amount of powder and small shot in the 
attempt to drive away these blue-coated intruders, 
the most of which is still embedded in the sides 
of the old weather-worn bird-house ; but the blue- 
birds were victorious, and I have never quite 
forgiven them. I never questioned the wisdom 
of the martins for departing, as the world was be- 
fore them; for bad company is ever to be shunned, 
and I have no doubt but that they are as happy 
to-day in some other home, as when they over- 
looked the broad meadows and deep-wooded valley 
which hid the waters of the not far off Songo. 



BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 49 

If people insist upon interjecting themselves into 
your affairs, and there is no way of avoiding 
their persistent interference and uncomfortable at- 
tentions, their clack and clamor, their petty mean- 
nesses and aggressions, do as the crows and hawks, 
the robins, and other summer songsters do, — 
give such people a wide berth, even if you have 
to go out of your way a little. If they get too 
close to 5^ou in the community, nail up the doors 
and windows nearest them; if they get into one 
end of the house, pack up quietly and leave them 
the field, which, if not the most satisfactory to 
your sense of right and justice and personal dignity, 
is certainly the most peaceable, and in the end the 
more profitable. The presence of a person who is 
troubled with moral atrophy is to be avoided. 

Every neighborhood has its quota of human king- 
bird and bluebird, its personified cent-per-cent, its 
heartless, senseless gossip, its argus-eyed monitor 
of the neighborhood morals, its jealous, dictating 
spirit, its disturber of households. Don't let them 
get their finger into your button-hole; shun them 
and their sayings and doings as you would the 
foul scents that drift from their chimney-tops. I 
have sometimes thought a little wholesome disci- 
pline of old-time ducking-stool and pillory or stocks 
would be the proper thing. I have met people 
before now who were, like a clock, evident^ wound 
up to run for twenty-four hours. They were en- 



t 

50 BIRDS OF A FBATHEJR. 

cyclopaedias of local, personal history, and the 
pictures of this or that person's characteristics were 
made by them much after the fashion of the pro- 
fessional etcher; it was mostly a process of scratch- 
ing and biting. If you are a stranger in a new 
community you will always find some would-be 
generous-hearted soul who will give you the inside 
and outside history of every family whose name 
may drop upon your hearing. I ever give such a 
wide berth. They are a blotch on humanity, these 
self-appointed gazetteers of communities. I have 
known some people to become so interested in the 
affairs of others, that they make the long vigil of 
the night to discover some secret failing of their 
neighbor that they might be the first to retail the 
sweet morsel. I have one in mind now, a so-called 
church-woman of excellent standing in her own 
estimation, who would not deem it beneath her 
sense of self-respect and honesty to do a little 
detective work on the sly. I have heard many a 
sly and poisonous insinuation from such people 
whose moral scent is so keen, made out of mere 
conjecture, and I have wondered if they could dis- 
cover the mud upon their own skirts, did there 
happen to be any there. I have also wondered at 
times if some people did use lyubin to aid them in 
hiding the uncleanliness of their own person. So 
I have thought those active conser^^ators of the 
private morals might be setting other people by 



BIRDS OF A FEATHER. 51 

the ears much as a backwoodsman builds his 
triangular smudge-fires to keep away his unwelcome 
visitors, the black flies and mosquitoes. Smoke is 
a great thing, if you can get it to blow in the proper 
direction. A ducking-stool and pilloiy for such are 
none too severe. Such treatment would be hardly 
more than homoeopathic in character ; and yet I have 
thought that public opinion was a worse pillory 
than any made with carpenter's tools. 

The truth of the matter is, that some people have 
too little of honest occupation, too little of good 
wholesome toil ; too much smell of Patchouly and 
Jockey Club, and too little of the smell of the 
factory, of the ploughed lands and of the woods, 
too little of their own business to attend to, and 
too much time to devote to the affairs of other 
people. There is too much preying upon other 
people's substance and reputation ; and yet, if ever 
the time comes when the kingbirds and bluebirds 
that walk the earth in human guise become true 
men and women, when neighbors respect neigh- 
bors' rights, and manliness and womanliness are 
the keynotes of action and living, when to be 
one great brotherhood is the universal aspiration, 
when honesty and truthfulness and sympathy make 
the staff upon which are written the songs of life 
and living, then the earth will be a Utopia indeed. 



PLAIN FARE. 



Thrice favored he who has a zvife 

Who betids or unbends, as her fortunes will ; 
Whose heart withholds no guerdon sought : 

If rich, is blest ; if poor, hath riches still. 




PLAIN FARE. 

WIXT hay and grass," has a deep mean- 
ing for the farm household. The apple- 
bin is empty, the potatoes in the cellar 
are buried in whitish-green sprouts a yard or less 
in length ; and of all the store of rotund beet, 
cabbage, and turnip, they have gone out the big 
cellar-doors to be ploughed into the garden long 
ago. To be sure, the parsnips are still plentiful, 
but the cook rebels against parsnips three times a 
day. The pork-barrel, like the widow's cruse, is 
bottomless. There are eggs enough to be had for 
the going after, when the hens do not steal their 
nests under some ragged bush by the wall and 
spoil the eggs by over assiduity and a desire to 
bring up a large family. Mayhap all the calves are 
heifers this year, and of too extra stock to veal, so 
the country butcher is relied upon with increasing 
disappointment. The larder is threatened with a 
drouth as to variety; but if any of the preserves 
or flaky jellies of the housewife's putting up are 
yet remaining in the cool, dark places about the 
house, here is an element of happiness in the fani- 

55 



S6 PLAIN FARE. 

ily. Dandelion greens are tabooed twice or thrice 
served, and what is there to eat ! ' ' No berries till 
June, ' ' the housewife sighs ; and it touches her 
pride sorely to see the men come in from the fields 
to gather about her dimity, snow-white board, 
always spread with an abundance of that which 
would be appetizing at almost any other season of 
the year, now grown commonplace in the dearth 
of relishes, only to eat sparingly, and in that half- 
hearted way which is dispiriting to every woman 
of spirit and hospitality. Pork fried, boiled, or 
swimming in soups is ever the same. It has that 
same unctuous fatness in whatever guise it comes. 
The men-folks appreciate the situation, and say 
nothing, well knowing that when the feast does 
open it will be well worth attending three times 
a day. But the farmer does not bother himself 
much with house affairs. The hens and chickens, 
the eggs and dairy part of the farm system, are 
appurtenant to the house treasury. The house- 
wife regnant must rely upon her own ingenuity- 
to tempt these faltering appetites. 

I have heard much of the queens of society, — 
that conventional elysium of upper-ten-dom with 
which the real men and women of the world have 
so little acquaintance, — but I have seen many a 
queen of the farm back among the valleys of a 
certain New England state, and I have thought 
the womanhood of the quiet, shady hamlet assur- 



PLAIN FARB. 57 

edly charming. But there are varieties of woman- 
hood. The rosy-cheeked lassies of the farm house- 
hold, the robust, sensible, matronly, farm wife, 
often not less regal in style, and as often more 
graceful than her city cousin, because more natu- 
ral, must be known to be loved and appreciated. 
The chief councillor of the farm court of ex- 
chequer is never without her meed of honor. 

I never ride past a farm-house, and note the 
array of shiny milk-pans set out on the stoop to 
dry, looking for all the world like a row of polished 
shields in the bright June sunshine, but what I start 
on a journey into dreamland, and conjure up a 
vision of the goddess of the dairy, and an imagi- 
nary feast of strawberries and cream, if perchance 
the creeping vines of the strawberry are in bloom 
by the wayside. I can remember such a womanly 
divinity of a generation ago. Did ever any one 
make such light, golden corn-bread or white 
feathery cream biscuit as were kneaded by her 
snowy hands and baked in the ancient tin oven 
by the heat of a brisk open fire, whose doughnuts 
and pies were of such delicious flavor as no mod- 
ern cook can imitate. 

Ye gods, what a delicious fruitage of wild straw- 
berries came with hot July from the side-hill rick 
above the meadow brook, all the sweeter by their 
having been plucked and hulled by mother's deft 
fingers as a tea-table offering to the tired hay- 



58 PIvAIN FARE. 

makers. I shall never forget the aroma of the mid- 
summer strawberry, blushing so ardently under the 
hot glances of its sun-god lover. What a glorious 
treat were they in their frosting of cool rich cream, 
fresh from the dark milk-room in the north corner 
of the granite-walled cellar, never approached by 
any combination of Jersey and Sharpless of more 
modern date ! What huge juicy berries, a half- 
dozen pendant on a single stalk, grew about the 
roots of the blackened stumps of the burnt lands ! 
How the mowers feasted on them with crimson- 
stained lips and fingers as they swept their glit- 
tering scythes under the clusters of long, slender 
stems heavy with their burden of toothsome temp- 
tation hidden away in the shadows of the succulent 
grasses. To the mower the feast is an alternate one 
of honey and strawberries. A warning buzz, and 
the humble-bee is telling in his way that some one 
is disturbing his hive in the stubble. He hovers 
excitedly over a bunch of dead grass, — rowett the 
mower calls it, — close down in the grass roots. It 
looks most like the home of the field-mouse, and 
when the lover of humble-bee honey has descried 
the nest, down he sits flat with legs sprawled out 
on either side with rifle in hand. When the big, 
angry bees blunder out, pat goes the rifle, flat side 
down, and the slow, unwieldy gatherer of meadow 
sweets is disabled or killed. Very few bees are 
found in a single colony, and the nest is soon taken. 



PLAIN FARE. 59 

The mower plucks his prize from the hollow in the 
fresh stubble, and with prudent apprehension ascer- 
tains that there are no bees in the gray, musty 
ball ; for the sting of the humble-bee is hardly less 
to be dreaded than that of the yellow-jacket, the 
paper-maker of the woods and meadows, and who 
has pre-empted a clump of maple-sprouts right in 
our mower's pathway. 

If you follow the track of the scythe you will see 
this heart-shaped domicil of the hornet, grayish- 
white in the sun, and hung well up in the fork of 
a slender branch just tinged with scarlet. It is a 
marvelous structure, with its tiers of inner chambers 
supported bj^ shapely columns of woody fibre, one 
above another, catacomb-like cells, insect tenement- 
houses closely wrapped about in a water-proof shell, 
some of the best specimens of which are often fifteen 
inches in diameter, and in length something more 
than that, and about which constantly hover alert- 
winged sentinels who keep close to the aperture at 
the bottom of the nest. This is the grand entrance, 
betrayed by no hooded porch or ornate decoration, — - 
simply a round hole, and it is well guarded by its 
insect tyler. The hornet is by nature a great insect- 
eater, and not less is he a dear lover of the choice 
fruits and flowers of the garden and their rich 
juices. Many a purple plum shows where he has 
tapped the downy frosting of its rind by a tiny 
exudation which, gleams in the sun like a minia- 



6o PLAIN FARE. 

ture dew-drop. The dead-leaf color of this insect- 
scavenger's nest hardly betrays to the foot- voyager 
through the leafy lowlands its nearness, except by 
the unusual hum which sounds above the commoner 
notes of the woods. I have a great respect for the 
hornet, and I should hesitate to interfere with any 
pet theory of his, for I have in mind an experience 
which was begun on my part in a spirit of boyish 
mischievousness ; but I poked my stick into the 
hornet's nest once too many times, and the troops 
on our side immediately converted the action into 
a Bull Run. A buffet from a hornet in full tilt is a 
shock to make one reel. He is the unerring marks- 
man most to be dreaded of all the family of horn- 
bearers. 

Sometimes the score of bag-like cells in the nest 
of the humble-bee are full of honey, but more often 
they are but a congregation of pupae. What de- 
spoilers of homes men are ! If the bee hovering 
over the ruins of his nest at our feet could make 
us to understand his mumbled language no doubt it 
would read much that way. What a lecture he is 
reading to this Antean mower whose mythic club is 
metamorphosed into the gleaming, keen-edged knife 
that sings a gleeful song as it pares the meadow 
floors with wide-cut swath. What a big fellow 
for such short, stubby wings this humble-bee is, 
swathed in such broad bands of gold ; and what a 
rumpus he makes digging into the old nest ; but his 



PIvAIN FARE. 6 1 

fellows are scattered, and no murmur of response 
comes to liis continuous hail of beating wings. 

But June conies before July in the calendar of our 
farmer, and Summer's luscious bounty is still in the 
bud or blossom. There are long da)'S ahead. The 
corn is sprouting in the ground ; across the potato- 
patch the imprisoned tubers are reaching their em- 
erald fingers up through the thin crust of the earth 
to the sun and rain, so we may easily mark the 
alignment of the rows, but the days of hoeing are 
not 3'et. There are hemlock trees to be cut. The 
bark is to go to the tannery and the tawny-colored 
logs to the mill. The tax-collector bothers the far- 
mer as well as other people; and taxes must be paid. 
A few cords of bark, a few thousand feet of sawn 
lumber, find a ready market ; so the woods pay a 
tribute as well as the fields. For this particular 
work not much preparation is necessary, beside the 
grinding and sharpening of the axes. It is a rare 
day in the merry month of June, when the days are 
longest. The birds begin with each morning a 
merrier, madder strain in their wanton love-making ; 
the green pile of the carpets which overspread field 
and slope grows longer and more flexible in the 
wind, more yielding to the footstep, more charming 
to the eye. Robin Good fellow wears his green suit 
to set the fashion, and withholds no boon of airy 
sprite from Nature ; but all are out in full holiday 
attire, bent on wild revel with the hamadryads, 



62 PLAIN FARE. 

the buds and blossoms. I never bear Bobolink 
but what I think Robin Goodfellow has taken him 
somewhere unawares and has bewitched him com- 
pletely, else he could not reel from his unwritten 
music, its broken chords and numberless oddities of 
tone and expression, such ecstasy of song. Robert 
of lyincoln is, of all the feathered choir, the irrepres- 
sible songster, whose tenor charms his fellows into 
silence. He is the prodigal of song. His notes 
come like the patter of the rain-drops on the roof, so 
fast they push each other from his dusky throat. 

Little has your true farmer of sentiment. He is 
not oblivious to these beauties of Nature so bounti- 
fully bestowed upon him, but he accepts them as of 
absolute right to which he has an unquestionable 
title ; and if he feels the rush of upward flowing 
saps, the inner response to the Infinitude of Nature, 
he can hardly tell you why. Prose does him good 
service, let poetry alone ; and yet no one can aflford 
such sunrises and sunsets at his porch-door as him- 
self. Plain fare, plain habits, and plain thought, 
speech, and manliness make up the sum of life. 
The cloud-capped hills, the quiet vallej^s and fertile 
fields, belong to the economies of Nature. His task 
is from sun to sun, and night, glorious summer 
night ! is but a partition-wall to keep the days 
apart ; fences in the gray pastures of Time the 
nights are, when the blinking stars watch over the 
sleepy farmhouses, to fade away when men awake. 



PLAIN FARK. 63 

This morning the choppers have come to break- 
fast. It is early, for the lawn is glistening wet 
with dew ; but the robins have finished their matins 
long since. The landscape is becalmed. The gray- 
smoke from the tall porch chimney climbs straight 
up into the sky till it is dissolved in the thin air of 
invisibility. There is not a single sail to be seen 
in the great ocean of blue overhead on this still 
morning. 

Painting the broad brims of our straw hats with 
odorous turpentine before leaving the house and 
collecting our accoutrements of steel, we sally out 
over the way to the hemlocks. Warrior-like, each 
man carries a wooden spud, a curved staff, its flat- 
tened end shod with steely, and a glittering axe, most 
likely thrown over the shoulder; and thus we trudge 
along, side by side or in single file. Axemen are 
great talkers, and each is a professor of woodlore. 
As they swing along the field with steady stride, 
they seem like gladiators on their way to some 
amphitheatre. I admire the sun-tanned, brawny 
arms of these sons of the woods, with their sleeves 
rolled above their elbows. What pent-up strengths 
lie hidden in those browned bunches of muscle the 
hemlocks will soon discover ! At the outworks of 
the timber-line hosts of midges, black flies, and 
mosquitoes come up to meet us ; but thej^ do not 
fancy the pungent perfume of the paint-shop, and 
we go on unmolested by these pests of the June 



64 PI.AIN FARE. 

woods. Along the border of the woods are tussocks 
of high-bush bkieberry growing luxuriantly ; their 
white bloom is plucked and eaten by the men with 
a relish. The blossoms are slightly acidulous and 
quite palatable. The chopper finds especial delight 
in the flavor of the tender sienna-colored shoots and 
twigs of the yellow-birch, and which smack strongly 
of checkerberry. A bitterish taste remains in the 
mouth which is not unpleasant. All about are the 
tall, shapely trees, with long, drooping masses of 
grayish-green moss trailing down from the tips of 
the limbs. The head chopper holds his axe by 
the handle, helm downward like a plummet, to see 
which way the tree leans; then selecting the place 
to lay its broad top, cuts in the lower scarf to 
make way for the big chips, which fly far out into 
the underbrush. How the stout blows rain down 
against the butt of the tree, chuck - chock - chuck ! 
making sharp staccato echoes which go flying up 
among the big limbs, rattling down the brown 
petioles, short, stubby, dried-up needles of the 
hemlocks, in showers about our shoulders. The 
black flies are legion. The red squirrels and 
chipmunks come out to see the meaning of these 
strange sounds. One little fellow, all red, with big 
bushy tail cocked over his back, sits pertly over- 
head and chatters awaj^ in a shrill, scolding voice, 
till the spine of the tree begins to splinter and crack 
as the axe reaches its marrow. The tree poises on 



PLAIN FARE. 6$ 

the centre of the stump for a moment, and with a 
shiver as of dread it sways to the right, and then 
with a mighty crash that seems to jar the floor of 
the forest the first giant is at our feet. The next 
thing is to girdle the fallen tree with our axes every 
four feet along until the thicker limbs are reached. 
The bark is started with the axe its whole length, 
and then pried off with the spuds; so the first tree 
is soon stripped of its covering, which is left to dry 
in the sun before piling. For days the woods are 
full of strange sounds : the sharp speech of the axe 
and the crash of falling trees fill them with dis- 
turbance and alarm for their dwellers ; but enough 
timber has been cut to make a respectable raft down 
the pond to the mills, and the birds and squirrels 
are at last at liberty to discuss the havoc of the axe. 
I have no doubt, if we could get at the record of the 
court which they will organize to inquire into the 
cause of this disturbance of their domain, that we 
should there read, ' ' An ambition to be great among 
the trees of the forest, if successful, is fraught with 
extreme peril and often untimely accident. It is 
better to be of less importance, wherewith one finds 
a larger store of content ! " " Bean porridge in the 
pot nine days old," may not be a delightful con- 
templation to an aesthetic appetite, but it made the 
sturdy sinew of the pioneers of Revolutionary times, 
and no doubt appeased the hunger of many of our 
less remote ancestors. Plain fare is the secret of 
good health, as occupation is of a contented mind. 



AFTER THE COWS. 



Beside the rail-fence and its ragged hedge, 
Aglow with the sumachs crimson flame, 

Down the pasture-slope to the roadside edge, 
Is the slender path the cattle came. 



AFTER THE COWS. 




ATTlvE lend to roadside and pasture a 
peculiar charm. Without its group of 
slow-moving herd leisurely cropping the 
sweet, tender grasses that grow rankest among 
the fragrant ferns and in the moist places of the 
hollows, or else scattered about the slopes where 
the shadows fall broadest and coolest as the 
midsummer sun gets toward the top of its jour- 
ney, stretched out ruminant and lazy-like with 
eyes half shut, chewing the cud of compla- 
cency^, animated spots of rich, warm color against 
the cooler verdure, the summer landscape would 
seem to lose some of its quality, some of its per- 
fectness. The mosaic of rock, tree, and fence is 
incomplete without its sheep huddled up against 
the shady side of the wall or hedge, looking for 
all the world like a bank of snow that the June 
sun had overlooked ; and its indolent herds, whose 
glossy coats of white, red, and brown shine like 
distant shields, whose tossing horns glint and 
glisten in the sun like burnished spear-heads. I 
happened into the studio of a friend a short time 

69 



70 AFTER THE COWS. 

since, and upon his easel was a large picture nearly 
finished ; but a few touches were needed to make 
it a masterpiece, and even then it was a magnifi- 
cent work. The sky was luminous with reflected 
light ; the clouds were as fleecy, as light, as those 
blown over the September hills and woods, along 
the margin of which drifted a filniy web of bluish 
vapor, a warm-tinted haze. An opening in the 
woodland led away across a low level that grew 
narrower with the growing distance, giving abun- 
dant scope to the imagination ; while in the nearer 
foreground the tall grass had grown tanned and 
dun-colored under the heat of the August sky ; 
and farther off the brownish-white backs of a flock 
of sheep overtop the uncut meadow-rue and blue- 
joint. The hardback bushes have lost their pink 
blossoms, the dainty flush of the wild-rose has 
vanished, but the fl5dng clouds have caught their 
tints. The clouds are real clouds as you stand 
back and look at them through your partially 
closed hand. How airily, lightty, they lie along 
the distant tops of the woods aglow with delicate 
tones ! One forgets that this picture is the work 
of the human artist. The gilded frame which 
holds the grand picture seems like a broad door- 
way, beyond which lies a reality in Nature. The 
staccatto rat -tat -tat of the woodpecker, the coarse 
note of the crow dropping down from some ancient 
hemlock-top in the outer margin of the forest, the 



AFTER THE COWS. 7 1 

smothered whir of the startled partridge, the jar- 
ring, rasping, discordant scream of the coward jays, 
the bark of the gray squirrel, and the strident 
music of creaking branches, are sounds which live 
in this idyl of the artist ; and yet without its 
flock of nibbling sheep, its bit of pastoral life, the 
picture would lack the charm of completeness. 
The presence of the sheep, or of a group of cattle 
in the landscape, add the quality of actuality, of 
truthfulness, which makes one believe it to be a 
true story which the artist has told. 

Hosts of pictures of the country came vividly to 
mind, sights and sounds that have slumbered since 
boyhood, almost ; and yet, not the less real because 
they have so long been hung with their faces to 
the wall. The life of a farmer-boy, with all its 
drawback of stinted privilege, its homely common- 
places, its dearth of unnatural excitements, is gilded 
with a charm that his cousin of the city cannot 
understand or measure. His playgrounds are no 
less than the broad acres of the paternal home- 
stead ; his sports are not of marbles or hopscotch 
along blistering pavements, but are those of hardy 
out-door pastime, with rod and gun among the 
woods and flower-strewn meadows. 

The rainy day that keeps the city cousin indoors 
sends the country boy to the laughing brooks, and 
into the cathedrals of the pines and hemlocks, and 
over the wet pasture-knolls. If the city has its 



72 AFTER THE COWS. 

diversions, the country has its fascinations. As 
I go out through the suburbs of the city I some- 
times see a drove of cattle tramping over the high- 
way ; and the awkward country lad who trudges 
along after them in the dust has not less of charm 
and interest than the brown-backed herd which 
has left hillside and runlet forever behind. There 
is no lack of romance to such a picture. I saw 
such an one to-day as I came out on the train. 
Another came with it of a boy, barefooted, with 
heart as light as air, scampering down the old 
highway below the orchard wall. He makes no 
stop or tarry till the scrub-pine this side the pas- 
ture bars is reached, where a too- venturous squirrel 
runs a race along the rail-fence with a swiftly-shied 
rock. I hear the dropping of the bars, and the 
echo comes back from the poplars in the swamp, — 
a rare musical note. The boy is myself. The 
cattle are over the hill. The pasture-side is steep, 
and over its slope are scattered patches of sweet- 
fern. I pluck a handful, and rub the leaves hard 
to get the fragrance which lingers with the memory 
of the old cow-path which hid itself not infrequentlj'' 
beneath their bloom. The ragged fence which sep- 
arates the field from the pasture is overgrown with 
sumac and choke-cherry. These latter are laden 
with rich-looking clusters of puckery fruit, and 
among them the cherry-birds and robins are taking 
a free lunch, — a five-o'clock tea I should judge 



AFTER THE COWS. 73 

by the chatter. They fly up the hill before me as 
if they expected me to give chase after them. I 
can discover them looking back furti^^ely over their 
shoulders as they fly farther up the line of the old 
fence, but they keep up a steady chatter. I wonder 
if birds evet talk about their neighbors ! but they 
must be saying something good of them, most of 
the time, for most bird-songs are of charming 
quality. I know of no bird-note that has not 
some redeeming feature in its roughest tone. 
What a climb the old pasture-hill always afforded 
my boyhood legs, and how they would ache when 
I got to the crest of the ridge. At the top I would 
take a moment's breathing-space ; and what an out- 
look of hill and valley was spread out before me ! 
for I am on the highest point of land for miles 
about. The great square chimnej^s of the home- 
stead look up through the orchard- trees below 
me, and farther below are the gray roofs of the 
barns ; and farther yet below is the dark line of 
shadowy woods, streaked with the yellowish-green 
of the meadows, with their single hay-barn, that 
reach beyond the limit of my vision ; and one 
might almost say in truth it was the fairest picture 
the vision had ever limned : 

Nortliward, beyond the forest liaze, 

Kataadin's dome of tree and rock 

O'erlooks Penobscot's waterways. 

The ancient graves of Norridgwock. 



74 AFTER THE) COWS. 

Westward, the sunset slowly trails 
Its shadows through broad intervales, 
Where Saco's slender thread comes winding down 
To turn the whirring spindles of the town. 

Beyond, the lofty White Hills make 
The dusky, sharp horizon-line. 
While to the southward, stream and lake 

Wind outward through their maze of pine. 
Where leagues away with silver speech, 
The salt tides flood a shining beach 
That looks far out upon the cool, blue seas. 
Sail-whitened with a world's rich argosies. 

Over the liill I go, but no cattle are in sight. 
Mid-pasture is a sinuous path the cows have made 
in the early summer as they came up from the 
old camp spring, up through the flowering thorn- 
bushes, white as they are in winter when the 
damp snow lodges in their thick-woven branches. 

Through the gap in the broken wall the worn 
path runs, and close under the shadow of a gnarled, 
scarred birch, at the foot of which are deep holes 
in the yellow dirt where the cows and steers have 
stood and thrown the loose loam high over their 
backs to drive away the flies. I put my hand to 
my mouth, — 

"Co-boss, co-boss, co, co, co!" — 

and the answer comes from the woods a half a dozen 
times. Some sprite of the woodland has thrown 



AFTER THE COWS. 75 

the echo outward in derision. I call again, and 
the answer comes from the herd at the farther end 
of the pasture a quarter of a mile away. It is 
"Spot's" voice that replies; I could tell it from 
a host of cow voices, — a trumpet tone as clear as 
that of a French-horn. Burroughs tells how many 
notes there are in the gamut of cow-music, but 
none ever sounded sweeter than the answering 
hail at night when the herd was to be driven up 
to be milked. Sometimes the fences got down in 
the woods, and then there was a tramp of the farm- 
hands over the headlands of the pond, and often- 
times the truants were not found until daybreak. 
What tramps those were through the shimmering 
moonlight, or through the pitch black darkness, 
with bright blazing torches of rolled birch or of 
pitch-pine spHt up into long, slender strips, and 
stoutly tied up with green wiccopy or leather-wood 
bark, a half a dozen splits or strips to each torch, 
to help us keep the trail of the herd left by their 
hoofs in the swamps and soft mould of the decaying 
leaves. How still the woods were, and how moist 
and chilling the night-wind in the hollows and 
lowlands ; and how warmly it blew against the 
cheek as we came out upon the uplands. An owl 
would suddenly hoot out his greeting as he flew 
over our heads, and then the silence would fall 
deeper and more ominous than before ; but we 
always found the cows, and brought them home 



"](> AFTER THE COWS. 

with us. We seemed like a group of town-criers 
as we went up and down tlie unlighted forest aisles 
calling the recreant cows and getting no answer. 

Here come the cows ! and trailing along after 
them is a sv/arm of midges, tiny black flies, that 
get into the ears, the nose, and eyes in an ex- 
ceedingly uncomfortable sort of a way. They are 
legion, rising and falling, a perfect cloud-mass as 
they hover about, but they disappear as the herd 
gets into the breeze on the upper slopes. I have 
plucked a handful of tender clover-blossoms for 
"Spot," the favorite of the farm, and as she 
reaches out her nose to get the proffered dainty, I 
get a breath of her perfumed cud that is not sur- 
passed by any 

" Odors from the spicy shore 
Of Arable the blest." 

It is a lazy, indolent pace that we take home- 
ward over the hill and up the highway to the 
barns whose great doors are thrown wide open, 
and whose sweet-scented mows are in full sight ; 
and, like some people I have known, I doubt if 
my otherwise well- trained cattle could withstand 
the temptation to help themselves were no one 
watching them. Good company is a very excel- 
lent restraint sometimes. 

The sun is down, and the wind is up ; the cheriy- 
birds and the robins have finished their five-o'clock 



AFTER THE COWS. 77 

tea. A single tree-toad adds his slender trill to 
the swamp-frog's deep bassoon, and what a tuning 
of pipe and horn ! The fire-fly has hung his dim 
lantern low in the grass, or in the alders, when 
most of the twilight singers have gone to bed. 
Up from the meadow comes the song of the night- 
ingale, the wonderful song of the veer>', so clear, so 
full, so round and lingering, in its cadences, dying 
away at last in a succession of prolonged but most 
perfect notes. No bird-note has ever charmed me 
and thrilled me as that of this night-bird of the 
meadows. No EngHsh nightingale can have mel- 
lower or sweeter song, — at least so it seems to me. 
Such is the rare companionship of a summer 
evening jaunt after the cows ; of these sights and 
sound-medleys ; of dense woodland and pasture- 
lot ; of unkempt fences and beaten highways ; of 
gray days, and of days that are not gray ; of wet, 
dripping skies and drifting mists, and of wind and 
calm. Nature has many an unwritten song, and 
many a written song as yet unsung. Her lovers 
hum them over lightly in their hearts, but only 
the birds and purling brooks, only the summer 
showers and driving storms, give them full vol- 
ume. To hear a grand symphony from Nature, as 
Nature herself renders it, is to forget it never. 
But the men have come in from the fields, and 
the day closes as it begins, with the milking of 
the cows. 



A LOTUS-EATER. 



When Slimmer winds blew o'er the town, 

And o'er the drowsy inland woods, 
O'er sleepy fnarsh-lands, seamed and brown. 

The sultriest of summer moods ; 
I dreamed of country lanes and nooks, 

Of grassy orchard-slopes and trees, 
Of crazy bobolinks, of brooks, 

And meadow-bloom, and hiimfuing-bees. 




A LOTUS-EATER. 

LXf out-of-door life is full of poetry and 
charm. Even when the simmering heats 
of midsummer make the lower strata of 
the atmosphere tremulous with their passion, the 
drowsiness which steals over one who is free from 
the irksomeness of labor under the hot sun is 
crowded with rare dreams and fancies. The sum- 
mer idler has all the resources of nature at hand. 
His feasts are laid among the lotus-eaters. His 
senses of seeing, hearing, and smelling are stimu- 
lated so they afford him the rarest of gratifica- 
tions ; but to be an epicure at the table over 
which Nature presides, one must be of very simple 
tastes and plain habit withal. Nature's sweetest 
songsters wear modest garb, and her grandest out- 
looks are reached only by wearisome climbing. 
Thrush, oriole, robin, or crazy Robert- of- lyincoln, 
listened to in their own homes, in field or wild- 
wood, their melodies are ever quick to touch 
men's hearts and affections. 

People of poetic temperament most enjoy the 
subtle beauties of the inner cloisters of the woods, 

or of the steep rocks and broken battlements of 

8i 



82 A LOTUS-EATER. 

the mountains ; and to find the rare treasures in 
Nature, one must get away from the beaten track 
into the out-of-the-way places, the woodpaths, 
the nooks and dells whose mosses are wet with 
the spray of rushing waters, into the shadows of 
the alders, the meadow elms, among the blossom- 
ing rue and yellow snap-dragons. 

A pleasant way of spending a summer day is to 
procure a plentiful supply of angle-worms, and 
with a reel of spare line, — silk is best, — a dozen 
lyimericks well ganged with good strong gut, and 
a light, well-balanced rod, to take some ancient 
woodland path or wood-road which will lead you 
soonest and easiest into the meadows. There is 
no need to wait for a rainy day, for it is a fallacy 
to say that trout do not, or rather will not, bite 
well when the sun shines brightly. I have proved 
it to the contrary many a time ; but the difficulty, 
that is, whatever difficulty there is, lies in this : 
no more wary fish lives in the brook than this 
selfsame trout ; and arouse his suspicions ever so 
lightly, unless his larder has been a barren one 
for several days, you coax his troutship in vain. 
When the sun shines clearly, the surface of the 
brook, mirror-like, catches the reflection of every 
object near its banks ; and where they are soft 
and springy, the slightest jar is sufficient to alarm 
every trout in the immediate neighborhood. Fre- 
quently, when you have reached the stream, you 



A LOTUS-EATER. 83 

discover with a sense of chagrin that an earlier 
bird, the other fellow ! is whipping the brook below. 
You may follow him with indifferent success, or 
you may go up stream trusting to soon get above 
the point where your rival set in. A trout-stream 
should be fished with the current, down. Your 
line precedes yourself, and your bait or lure ap- 
proaches the trout the more naturally as it floats 
with the ripples into the snowy foam of the eddy- 
ing waters. It is not a bad idea to follow the bed 
of the stream itself, if one does not care for the 
wetting he is sure to get. To avoid the dilemma 
of being anticipated by other fishermen, rise with 
the sun, and start off through the sparkling dew 
to the meadows. The world is fresh ; the robins 
are whistling up the winds on the orchard slopes. 
The breathing of the morning air is like sipping 
nectar, and the broad-leaved brakes and sweet- 
ferns scatter liquid diamonds on your path as you 
brush by them. You rush back into the buoy- 
ancy of boyhood. The years drop from you una- 
wares, and your pulse quickens, while the smell of 
pines is like the bouquet of some precious vintage. 
Down over the sharp brow of the hill is the mar- 
gin of the wood, with its wide-limbed beeches and 
flaring tops, where I have gathered many a bag of 
nuts in the brown autumn ; and here, at its west- 
erly edge, is the old logging-road which leads 
Straight to the • meadows. The cattle-path runs 



84 A LOTUS-EATER. 

from one side to the other of the road, making a 
crooked sort of a trail, hke the track of a drunken 
man. Cattle always turn aside for the slightest 
obstacle, even if it be nothing more than the lop- 
ping branch of the slender alder. The roadside is 
fringed with lichens and lightish-green blades of 
grass, tall and spindling, but the bluets, the white 
and purple violets, and the wood anemone, are here 
in abundance. There is enough to see as I follow 
the rough trail, with its slippery rodks and great 
tree-roots, washed bare by the spring-time torrents 
which came off the hillsides. A red-crested wood- 
pecker is digging busily into the trunk of the 
black-barked hemlock for his breakfast of larvae ; 
the chickadees chirp and chatter among the scrub- 
spruces ; a wood-pewee hops along beside me and 
keeps sajdng, ' ' Pewee ! pewee ! peer ! " in a low, 
sweet tone. A huge toad has begun his game 
of leap-frog for the day by jumping clumsily out 
of the way ; a hen-partridge sounds swift notes of 
warning to her chicks, and runs suddenly under 
my feet to distract my attention until the chicks 
get safely to cover, to as suddenly fly off into the 
woods with a loud reverberant whir, not unlike the 
swift muffled roll of a drum. 

But partly through the woods, and I have come 
to what the settlers called in the primitive days of 
log-houses and blazed highways the Plantation, — 
a circular opening in the woodland, and which used 



A LOTUS-EATER. 85 

many years ago to be the rye-field of the old 
farm. Huge stumps of the now rare pumpkin 
pine are scattered over its area ; and among them 
are numerous tall stubs, washed clear of their sap 
by a century of storms, which reach fifty feet into 
the air, and their sides are as smooth and slippery- 
looking as obelisks. The place is lonesome enough, 
as all old rookeries are. I take to the woods 
again, and am fairly within them, when through 
the arched opening ahead is revealed the white 
bloom and graceful elms of Kemp's meadow. 
Clambering over the low brush fence, I have star- 
tled a huge snow-white owl from his roost ; and 
with noiseless flight he scurries out into the sun- 
light and then back into the shadows of the black 
hemlocks. A solitary hawk eyes me from the spur 
of a tall dead tree as if I were an intruder. Perhaps 
I have given him good reason to regard me with 
suspicion, for I am perfectly silent and somewhat 
stealthy in my movements. Seeing that my tackle 
is all right, and putting some wet grass into my 
creel to keep the trout fresh and glossy, I creep up 
to the brook as softly as I am able and throw my 
hook with its wriggling worm deftly over the tall 
masses of pigeon-berry. It strikes the stream as 
lightly as a feather, — a swift, gleaming ripple, a 
half-audible plash, a tightening of the line, and a 
moment later, before one could count ten, the first 
trophy is landed in my basket, or willow creel, A 



86 A LOTUS-EATER. 

crow, perched upon the top of a tall pine in the 
margin of the alders, sings out, — 

*' Haw ! haw ! haw ! kaw-r-r-r ! 
Kaw-r-r-r ! kaw-r-r-r ! " 

a sort of guttural- like guffaw of approbation ; but I 
pay no attention to his evident interest in my pro- 
ceedings, and one trout after another goes into my 
basket until I have actually a full baker's dozen of 
spotted beauties out of this one pool. But I am 
not satisfied, — what angler ever was ? — to leave 
such luck without another throw, and I have angled 
a good ten minutes without a bite. Patience is the 
secret of the successful angler. Deftness comes 
with experience. 

As the sun gets higher in the sky, I wander far- 
ther down the stream, and with the sport comes 
the zest of a constantly changing landscape. The 
outline of the woods rises and falls like the long, 
rolling swells of the sea, and the path beside 
the brook is strewn with flower tones, soft and 
delicate as the hues of the clouds. Clumps of the 
blue-flag reach up out of the amber shallows, and 
toss their purple petals to the wind or dip caress- 
ingly to the water ; the yellow blossoms of the 
graceful columbine gleam brightly against the dark 
verdure of the alders ; beds of bog- arum, the calla 
of the meadows, white as the driven snow, are 
scattered along the runs ; stalks of the spiderwort 



A LOTUS-EATER. 8y 

add their charm of reddish-violet color to the 
modest garb and tiny flower of the early meadow- 
rue, and with the feathery tops of the blue-joint, 
shoulder-high, the cats-tail grass, the broad leaf 
and yellow globe of the cow-hly in the brook, 
with the stalwart daisies and buttercups, make 
the undulating levels of color that are found no- 
where else in so perfect a combination. Shapely 
elms throw their shadows in round masses here 
and there at random athwart the mixture of bloom 
that fills the air with sweets ; the hum of the 
bumble-bee, busily plucking the honey from the 
myriad blossoms, his sides splashed with gold-dust, 
the songs of warbler and throstle, the vagabonds 
of the lowlands, shaking out carol after carol of 
liquid tones and semi-tones, the chirping of the 
sparrows, the shrill challenge of the hawk, and 
the hoarse laugh of the crow, and the soughing 
of the pines, are but parts of the grand medley 
of Nature. For all my wildwood surroundings, I 
am not so far apart from humanity. I have passed 
two or three dilapidated barns, the wide-open doors 
of which, looking out upon the uncut meadows, 
made me think of Polyphemus and his one eye 
gloating over his victim. Their empty bins look 
as if hungry for the nodding grasses, and before 
the day is out I am driven to their shelter by a 
sudden shower. 

What a lonesome, poverty-stricken interior a 



88 A LOTUS-EAT:eR. 

single one reveals as I cross its wide threshold ! 
What a littering of pale, rain-bleached water-grass 
strews the floor with its slovenly suggestion ! 
An old, worn-out grindstone, loosely hung to its 
wobbly shaft, a rusty scythe, a rickety, weather- 
worn hay-rack, a pitch-fork or two, and a rake 
with a dislocation of its spinal column, make up 
its complement of haying-tools. While I am look- 
ing about my shelter, I hear the patter of the rain 
on the low, sloping roof, — the drip - drip of the 
water on the boards beside me from a leak in the 
loose shingles overhead ; sharp flashes of light- 
ning come in through the door and through the 
crannies and cracks in the sides of the building, 
and the crash of the thunder sounds like the rip- 
ping, stripping, and scraping of rafter and ridge- 
pole clean of their covering of board and shingle ; 
but the sun comes out in the west, and the thick- 
falling drops glisten like a shower of brilliants. 
The rain has gone to eastward, and the thunder 
dies away in low growlings and mutterings beyond 
the farthest hills. The tree-tops are dripping with 
wet ; their leaves glisten like silvered emeralds ; 
and up and down their soaked trunks the lichens 
have slaked their thirst, and, doubly grown, lend 
their warm tints of old-gold, their reds, browns, 
and purples, to the cooler drabs and grayish, Qua- 
kerish tones of the rough bark of the elm-trees. 
The rain has beaten the grass prone and flat, 



A LOTUS-EATER. 89 

but it will come up again with the morning sun 
when the water has dried out of it. 

The tremulous whistle of the plover conies down 
off the uplands. The atmosphere, the floors of 
the air, are swept clean by the thunder, and far- 
off sounds come distinctly and seem near at hand ; 
I hear the teams along the highway, and the 
shouts of the men in the fields on the upland 
slopes a mile away. I wander down the stream 
through the succession of meadows, whipping the 
brook with indifferent luck, for the stream has 
grown turbid and the trout do not take readily to 
the lure. Now and then a rapacious clutch upon 
the hidden hook is a signal for a deft twist and 
a sudden pull upward^. I have a study in oil, 
rapidly sketched, of a brook-trout captured that 
day, which measured over fourteen inches, which 
was one of the finest specimens of the redspot 
I have ever seen. I have had many a harder 
pull from trout less than half that size than from 
this prince of luck. A four-joint, twelve-ounce, 
lance-wood rod, with a very slender tip, did the 
work. 

I catch the sound of children's voices; and 
through an opening in the woods I get glimpses 
of a gray roof and red chimneys, from one of which 
a thin ribbon of blue smoke curls lazily up, up, till 
the wind catches it and blows it into the hemlock- 
tops. But I have come to a fence. The stakes 



90 A LOTUS-EATER. 

whicli hold up its long, sagging poles have been 
driven this season ; and to one of them is nailed 
a bit of board, across which is scrawled a notice 
to trespassers, — a species of free-hand charcoal 
drawing, — which I read with increasing interest. 
Here it is as I deciphered it: — 

"Notis 

eny Person ketched fisliin' in this medder 
will Be Prosekuted to ful eckstent of Law." 

Here was an obstacle, certainly ; and having a 
very wholesome regard for anything which smacks 
of legal process, I take a short cut over the knoll 
into the highway with a creel full of dainty trout, 
with a pair of wet feet, and an appetite which 
would put to shame the one I knew less than a 
week before in my city home, and which was ripe 
for anything from a boxberry to a beefsteak or 
a crisply-fried trout. I wondered as I went over 
the tussocks of tender brake and checkerberry, 
thick with black stumps and blueberry bushes, if 
the trout in the brook stopped to read the ' ' Notis ' ' 
as they sped up the rip-raps on their way to the 
head-waters of College Swamp. Whether they 
did or not it mattered little, as the day's sport 
was all that the heart of dear old Izaac Walton 
could have desired. With its bright morning at- 
mosphere, its perfume of wood and meadow, with 
its alternate silence and song, and later in the day 



A LOTUS-EATER. 9 1 

its refreshing showers and exhilarating experiences, 
it was a day to please the heart of any lover of 
out-door sport. 

The high-road is streaked with long, narrow, 
muddy spaces and puddles of water from the re- 
cent shower ; and if I ever longed for wings it is 
now. Three miles away, straight as the crow 
flies, overtopping the low woods between, I see the 
square, hip-roofed farmhouse on the hill, its sharp 
angular lines hidden and softened by the round- 
topped elms, its window-panes glowing and flashing 
like the flames of a conflagration. I am startled 
for a moment as I watch their bright light, and 
then I know it is only the caress of the sunset. 
But I have struck into another old logging-road. 
The dusk is rapidly falling as I cross its decaying 
corduroys, still I trudge noiselessly on through the 
perfumed woodland. What odors of spruce, of 
pine, of birch-tree, and what fragrance of wood- 
land fern and flower ! The new moon has hung 
its slender horn just over the crest of Kiarsarge, 
where it overlooks the Conway Intervales ; the 
fire-flies have come out for a romp in the swamp- 
path v/hich is slowly filling with warm, white- 
drifting mists. In an hour or two later these trees 
will be submerged in a sea of dense fog. The 
whippoorwill ' ' sounds ' ' the pitch, and then comes 
a burst of melody from every night-bird in the 
lowland, and the day is over. Out of the woods 



92 A LOTUS-EATER. 

at last and up the pasture-side I look back over 
the quiet scene. The new moon is just dipping 
behind the White Hills, and a single bright star 
is following slowly behind. Higher up in the sky 
the lamps are being lighted, and there is a faint 
suggestion of the " milky-wa}^," with its broad 
girdle of starry brilliance. Before me are the 
lights of the farm, nearer and warmer than those 
of the sky ; its house-doors, thrown wide open to 
the cool night air, renew their hospitality ; and 
once across their thresholds I am at rest, when 
rest was never more grateful or enjoyable. 



HOMELY SOUNDS. 



As if some hand the ivory keys 
Of olden times had swept across : 

Brought back their subtile harmonies 
To e?nphasize our sense of loss. 




HOMELY SOUNDS. 

HERE is nothing like the hearing of a stray 
bird-note, a long-forgotten chord of music, 
or homely sound familiar in boyhood or 
youth, to arouse the liveliest of recollections. Each 
succeeding year finds one farther and farther away 
from the old landmarks, more and more deeply 
buried in life's activities, — activities which crowd 
one day into another with unrelenting swiftness, 
and which seem never to have an end ; an old 
story, the telling of which is never done ; a trans- 
formation process, by which the country lad, as 
generous as his outlook was broad, is rehabilitated 
and made over into the cool, calculating, bustling 
merchant, banker, or manufacturer, or into the 
man whose profession taxes his utmost energies, 
his broadest capacity, and his courage alike. Men 
say there is but one groove in which they may run 
if they are to expect the highest form of success, 
and so they unconsciously grow to see only them- 
selves and their one ambition. The milestones over 
which they have so far come are forgotten ; only 
those before them have any charm or interest. 

95 



96 HOMEIvY SOUNDS. 

There is a wonderful singleness of purpose in 
their career. The old-time playmates, grown into 
manhood like themselves, the old-time scenes of 
boyish task and romp, are seldom if ever revisited ; 
the days of quaint, homely ways and homespun 
garb smack too much of sentiment, and are tabooed, 
put in the garret, stored away with other useless 
and antiquated associations. Business regards Sen- 
timent as a poor partner; but to my mind, were 
there more sentimental traits where Nature is 
concerned, more of the milk of human kindness 
and human brotherhood in the counting-room, in 
the bank, at the stock-boards, and on the street, 
there would be less of dishonesty, less of financial 
disability, and less of distrust ; there would be 
more of hearty sympathy and less of selfishness. 
As soon as some begin business for themselves, their 
hearts begin to ossify ; the process of crowding out 
whatever does not tend to pecuniary gains is per- 
fected so that even the home circle falls within the 
line of its proscriptions. When humanity is re- 
garded as an unwelcome tenant, when men put it 
out of their hearts as a landlord does the goods 
of his delinquent, who is driven into the street 
homeless and hopeless, then is the world so much 
the poorer of its manhood. Hard-heartedness, sor- 
did meanness, may make men wealthy in money 
and lands, but they are poor indeed. Poverty has 
no meaning deep enough to sound the emptiness of 



HOMELY SOUNDS. 97 

such living. Man's influence and capacity are not 
impaired by his having a big heart or for any love 
he nia}^ cherish for Nature in her man}'' guises, for 
the old homestead and its quaint ways of living, 
or for his youthful associations, but are the rather 
strengthened. A man with a soft spot in his 
bosom, who cannot forget the old red- tiled hearth 
and its blazing back-log, who yearns for a breath 
of the hills, who dreams of the bobolink and his 
song, of windy capes that look far out to sea, and 
of inland farm with its outlook of undulating ver- 
dure, who sighs for an apple from the favorite tree 
in the ancient orchard, and a moment's rest on 
the worn threshold in the yellow sunshine, is not 
less the man for an emergency, or one who is less 
likely to succeed in his business or profession. 

During the day I live in the mid-heart of a great 
city. Huge blocks of business houses, of brick, 
granite, and marble, thick with embrasures of dec- 
orated lintel and window, of iron pilaster and orna- 
mented frieze, shut the narrow arteries of the town 
so closely in that only sun and wind dare venture 
through them, and where sweep on with restless 
roar vast human tides that are always at their flood. 
No vesture of green lends its color or shade to cool 
the heated atmosphere ; only the polished pave- 
ments, worn slippery with the passing of heavy 
drays and the tramp of iron-shod hoof, stare ever 
to the sky. The siin shines into my room through 



98 HOMELY SOUNDS. 

panes of crystal and falls with mellowed light upon 
the floor ; but that is all of suggestion that comes 
to me from the outer world, with its fragrant odors, 
its green fields, and birds whose throats are swollen 
with dainty song. I sit at n^ desk with no other 
thought than of the perplexing questions which 
men bring to me for solution. I work and delve 
as laborers do, for hire, and in a realm of abstract 
principles, as devoid of poetry as the straight line 
is of beauty. There is a proverb of the profession, 
that " Law is a jealous mistress," and I have come 
to believe the saying to be a true one; yet shut 
Nature out of the house, and slam the door in 
her face as often as I may, back she comes through 
every chink and cranny of the heart, only waiting 
for the magic of sortie homely sound to call her 
forth. 

lyoud and clear above the thunder of the streets, 
above the beating of the human surf against their 
walls, comes the clarion challenge of some stray 
Chanticleer. It comes again and again shrill and 
clear in the morning air. There is freedom in the 
note of this barnyard fowl who has by some mis- 
chance found his way into these haunts of busy 
men. There it comes up over the roofs again as 
breezy as the winds which blow over the lengthy 
ridgepole where this same Chanticleer has many 
a time greeted the rosy morn with his rustic note, 
as lordly, as imperious in its tone, as if all his 



HOMELY SOUNDS. 99 

numerous harem were there to hear. This crow- 
ing of the rooster in his narrow coop somewhere 
on the street is a signal for a grand transformation 
scene. The walls of my den fade away into vistas 
of low walls, broken and gaped, with rows of apple- 
trees leaning over them white and pink with bloom, 
and a dusty higlnvay between. The firagrant smell 
of a glossy-leaved tree, the Balsamodendron Gilead- 
enses, haunts the dewy morn ; the lilacs in full 
blossom flash their bright colors in my face from 
one corner of the lawn. The great doors of the 
barns are thrown open, and their interiors look 
cool and inviting. I hear the barn-swallows whis- 
tling among the great beams as they play at house- 
building. Back and forth they fly, first with a 
straw and then with a mouthful of cement from 
the roadside-puddle, making the echoes ring among 
the cobwebs and dust-stained rafters. An old-fash- 
ioned house, once yellow, but now faded and worn 
with sun and storm of two generations, sits above 
the white line of the road ; a broad-topped, wide- 
limbed elm reaches well out over its low hip-roof, 
from which rise two huge chimnej^s, cumbrous 
afiairs, with bricks enough in their red turrets to 
build a modern house, and in and out of which 
go and come trooping hosts of the chimney swal- 
low. When a boy, I thought their flights up and 
down the interior of the chimneys sounded like 
distant thunder, and many a time has my heart 



100 HOMEIvY SOUNDS. 

quaked within me as I heard the dreaded sound 
in the night. Bach j^ear as the summer came 
around the chimnej^s had to be burned out, and a 
wet day was always chosen as a better protection 
against outside conflagration. The great bundles of 
straw were tucked into the massive, wide-mouthed 
fireplaces, and as they were being lighted I would 
run out of doors to see the hasty flight of black, 
stubby-looking birds rise from the chimneys, — and 
what a colony of them there was ! Round and 
round the stacks of soot-stained bricks the swal- 
lows circle in graceful, rapid flight, now high, 
now low, to finally dart down, one after another, 
straight as a plummet-line, to disappear into the 
hollows of the square-topped chimneys. The chim- 
ney-swift is a bird of motion. I have never seen 
one of them alight, not even on the threshold of 
his home ; and as dull and sombre-colored as is 
his feathery coat, without him the old homestead 
would seem lonesome indeed, when the great fires 
have burned themselves out in the early spring 
days. The swift comes with the early summer, 
and takes his flight away with the coming of the 
scarlet flame of autumn. His only farewell is in 
the unusual activitj^ of his gyrations and his in- 
creased numbers as the August suns creep down 
the western skies, and the caverns of brick and 
clay are silent until another year. 

I see a rosy-cheeked woman on the sloping lawn 



HOM:eivY SOUNDS. lOI 

with a pan of wet corn-meal tucked under her 
arm. She stirs the meal with an energetic move- 
ment, and as she straightens up I see the perfect 
contour of her figure against the dark background 
of a wide-open porch-door. She has the pose of 
a Hebe, leaning shghtly back as she does, and 
might well pass for one of Nature's divinities in 
her simple beauty and native grace. I hear the 
sharp staccato rat-tat-tat of her iron spoon against 
the flaring side of the tin-pan, and a musical call, 
a bird-like note from the rustic beauty's throat of— 
" Biddy-biddy-biddy-bid-bid-bid," —beginning with 
an adagio movement which is accelerated in cre- 
scendo to a full, robust tone, to die away in melo- 
dious diminuendo away up the scale. A thirty- 
second note is nowhere. The flock comes from 
every direction. The hens answer with outspread 
wings and swift-shod feet ; the chicks scarce seem 
to touch the ground in their hurry ; the turkeys 
roll along Hke sailors on the land with all their 
sea-toggery on ; and last of all to come to break- 
fast is lordly Chanticleer. The rooster is Lord 
High Constable, and he wields his baton with 
dignity. He is half-human in his attentions to 
the beauties of his harem. But the breakfast is 
soon over; and the flock, done with their flurry 
and scramble about their mistress' feet, scatter 
themselves among the nodding buttercups and 
clover of the orchard, or over the broad lawn be- 



I02 HOMELY SOUNDS. 

spattered with the bright yellow disks of the 
dandelions and sweet honeysuckle. The shadow 
of a hawk leaves its circle on the grass, and 
there is a grand rush for shelter amid no slight 
tumult of gallinaceous clamor, and the silent hawk 
sails away over the lowlands and meadows, his 
commonest haunts, only to return at a later day 
with better success. Reynard has the better luck 
lying in some hidden ambUsh for his prey. It is 
more likely to be the outer skirts of field or pasture, 
and there is no clamor, for the fox, with ample 
cunning, performs his work with neatness and 
despatch ; onl}^ the feathers lying about the grass 
or rocks are left to tell the fate of our waylaid 
favorite. When Reynard is hungry with a long 
fast he is a brave fellow, going even into the barn- 
yard and house-garden to take his choice of the 
flock ; but naturally he is a great coward. As 
the sun goes down at night he comes out on the 
margin of the woods and barks his discontent with 
a long-drawn, snappish whine, and as the sound 
comes up the pasture slope on the wind a murmur 
of satisfaction runs along the roosts in the sheds ; 
only Chanticleer gets up to listen, and with a soft 
note he settles again upon the perch, and the heads 
are quickly stuck under their respective wings, and 
all are asleep. 

Did you ever see a young rooster tiying to get 
the crow out of his throat ? His long feathers are a 



HOMEIyY SOUNDS. I03 

decoration of the future, and in his ragged, un- 
kempt costume, scarce reaching to his scrawny legs, 
he mounts the top rail of the fence, if there is one, 
and makes the supreme effort of his young rooster- 
hood, stretching up so straightly as to almost top- 
ple backwards ; and what a queer sounding crow it 
is ! The first note is robust enough, but the other 
notes are weak and uncertain, now thick, now thin, 
spanning an octave without method or sequence, 
reminding me of an old acquaintance of my boy- 
hood who seemed never to have his voice under 
control, but who would bounce the whole gamut 
in the articulation of a single word. An hour on 
the top of the fence or woodpile practising a single 
series of squawks is no unusual diversion for a 
young rooster. I know of nothing similar for sheer 
pluck and pertinacity except it be a boy who has 
just discovered how to pucker his mouth for a whis- 
tle, and when the pucker is fairly gotten into shape 
it stays put for a long interval, and its shrilly 
pitched discords haunt one dismally indoors and 
out. The small boy and the small rooster are 
marked characters in their way, and are not utterly 
dissimilar in the commoner traits. The small boy is 
great on noise, so is the rooster. The small boy 
will straddle the ridge-pole of the barn fearless of 
danger and admonition, and if that is beyond his 
reach, a lesser height will do ; the rooster is not less 
ambitious. If you have one of each in the family 



104 HOMELY SOUNDS. 

you are like to find both at the tip-top of the high- 
est elevation on the premises. But roosters, like 
boys, attain dignity with age, and though of homely 
note and noisy guild they are the pride and profit 
of the farmer. There is no concealment about our 
Chanticleer ; he is honest as the day is long, and 
as contented and happy as an honest body should 
be, and when he blows his trumpet all the world* 
may hear and all the world may see. A flock of 
Brahmas or Plymouth Rocks, like a herd of choice 
Jerseys, is one of the compensations of the farm, 
as indispensable to its poetry and charm as is the 
presence of its girlhood and its robust woman of 
the household. To dream of the one is to dream 
of both ; but all dreams end, and mine has gone 
with my Chanticleer of the street. 



IN THE WOODS. 



/ 



O land of beauty, fair to see. 

It needs no seer with trained eye, 

Or microscopic scrutiny, 

To read the truths that underlie 
The guise of Nature's purity. 




IN THE WOODS. 

^ATURE is oftentimes of strange, wayward 
inclination. Like a spoiled child she smiles 
and pouts in turn ; and again, like some 
wild, untamable creature, she lashes herself into 
paroxysms of furious wrath. When Dame Nature 
is aroused with stormy passion, her face is dark 
with shadow ; she pelts the fields with javeHns of 
rain and hail ; she rakes the hedges and bending 
grasses with tempests, and smites the tree-tops 
with fierce whirlwinds, twisting them into the 
veriest shreds in her savagery. I have followed 
the pathway of many a storm by its havoc among 
the shapely forest-giants, their tops laying low 
down amid the dwarf growths of cherry and 
maple, with their wide-reaching roots tipped high 
up in the air like giant antlers ; and what broad 
gashes they were ! I have noticed that when the 
wind mows a deep swath through the pines a 
hard-wood growth follows, and there is a streak 
of warm bright color across the darker belt of 
evergreens. These seeds of birch, of maple, cherry, 
and beech must have lain dormant in the black 
scurf and decayed matter for a long space, waiting 

107 



Io8 IN THE WOODS. 

for the coaxing of the sun to break the monoto- 
nous bondage of plant-sleep in which the germ 
lay. Seeds are great travellers. The winds and 
birds are the common carriers, — the seed-planters 
of the woods, — and with their assistance the 
seeds go far from the tree on which they grew 
and ripened. I have noticed also that trees, like 
humanity, have the tendency toward gregarious- 
ness. They grow up in families ; here a clump of 
hemlocks, there a group of pines ; in the lowlands 
are acres of juniper or hackmatack, and along the 
dryer portions of the swamps are phalanxes of 
stalwart spruces, each one as straight as a ship's 
spar, and much taller. Higher up the slopes are 
groves of hard-wood growth, each individual spe- 
cies choosing its own soil, growing best where the 
conditions are most favorable. As I go over the 
pasture I have noticed an abundance of the Amer- 
ican yew, or ground-hemlock, spread out over the 
slopes, looking like huge green saucers ; and over 
the " stab-and-run " fence in my neighbor's pasture 
is nothing but scrub-oak b}^ the acre. The birch is 
the Bohemian of the woods. In swamp or on up- 
land it is equally at home, and I think it the hand- 
somest tree of all ; and this is true of either variety, 
— canoe or yellow. Its white bark, blotched with 
stains of umber and sienna, its shades of gray and 
pink, its ruddy-tinted twigs, and long, feathery 
tassels, its bright-colored leaves, give individuality 



IN THE WOODS. 109 

and pleasing character to tlie species. I make my 
drinking-cups from the bark of this tree, and the 
cold sparkling water of the mossy-rimmed spring 
is flavored with its aroma. I reach upwards on 
its trunk six feet or more, and draw my sharp 
blade downward toward the ground. I start the 
outer covering of bark carefully down the length 
of the gash, and then push outward with hand 
and arm, and so work around the tree ; and I am 
doing that which the Indian has done so many 
times before me. I lay the bark in the sun, and 
the heat rolls it tightly together ; and after it has 
fully seasoned, when the heavy autumn rains have 
come, and the land-locked salmon have gone up 
the swollen brook for a night to spawn, I run a 
stick into my coil of birch-bark, and I have the 
same sort of a flambeau or torch as the Indian 
used to make for himself when he went fishing for 
salmon. It is the same birch of the canoe. It is 
the tree of Romance. As I lean against the smooth 
sides of the birch, and look out into the broken 
vistas of the woods, I seem to see the dusky nomad 
of the wilderness moving swiftly and stealthily 
over their checkered floors ; I smell the smokes of 
his evening fires as they drift along on the damp 
winds ; the stroke of his paddle comes up from 
the stream : but no ! it is the red-shirted riverman 
getting his logs into the boom, and the smoke is 
that of the fire which has lent its warmth to his 
dinner. The ring of the axe is a human sound. 



no IN THE WOODS. 

It is in the woods that I find the most perfect 
repose in nature. The trees are Earth's natural 
covering, with which she concealed her primeval 
nakedness from man, and within which she even 
now strives to hide the rare perfection of her veg- 
etable processes, her reduplications of lichen, plant, 
and tree, her animal life with all its brute unre- 
straint and inherited instinct, and her bird-life in 
all its charm of song and wild abandon. The lim- 
pid waters of lake and stream, the untrodden fresh- 
ness of nooks and leafy dells, fill the measure of 
the fascination of the woods. A June day under 
the brawny, wide-limbed beeches, their network of 
smaller branches hidden by dainty arabesques of 
leaves unfolding to the sun, when the mossy knolls 
and hollows beneath are strewn with broken shafts 
of sunshine, with here and there a cluster of violets 
whose soft colors were surely stolen from the sky, — 
is a feast for the gods. All about me are fallen logs 
in all stages of decay, and on the tops and sides of 
which grow in profusion scarlet, cream-colored, and 
spotted fungi, so soft and tender that their thick 
stems break at the touch of the hand, the most 
beautiful of which are the Agaricas comatus and 
the Boletus ediilis. I^ichens grow luxuriantly upon 
the beech, and some of them are very beautiful. 
No more delicate colors are found in the woodland 
than in these flowerless plants. 

In the open places, where the ground is moist, I 



IN THE WOODS. Ill 

find some fine specimens of marestail, and always 
several varieties of delicate ferns. In the woods 
the springs are not far apart, and from one to wind- 
ward come familiar scents of spearmint and of pep- 
permint, which when in blossom are not unlikely 
to be plucked by some diligent gatherer of herbs 
and hung in pendent bunches, beside the long 
sprays of the garden catnip, from the stained 
rafters of some farmhouse garret. In June the 
summer is in its period of adolescence ; the woods 
are newly clad in a garb which is soon to grow 
rusty and faded with too much sun. How eagerly 
I follow the making of these summer garments! 
No sooner has the snow thawed from the slopes 
than I have discovered that the tips of the limbs 
and tender sprouts have begun to redden with the 
rushing upward of the rich saps. The ice has 
gone out of the river, and I watch the willows on 
its banks to get a glimpse of the first catkin ; the 
willow and birch catkins come earliest, and troops 
of merry children scour the river-banks and runs 
for the velvety pom-pons of the former ; the rock- 
maples, the sugar trees of New England, grow 
ruddy in the pastures and along the margins of 
the woods. The oaks of the uplands, the red, yel- 
low, and white, of which the latter is the most 
tardy, are the last to dress in green, and their leaf 
is the broadest, toughest, and richest, in its royal 
purple, of them- all. The fluffy blossoms of the 



112 IN THE WOODS. 

elm, tlie favorite of the village highway, follow 
closely after the catkins, and when they drift down 
on the wind I know that the foliage of the elm will 
soon cast its welcome shadows across the white 
dusty street. When the leaves begin to grow the 
song-birds begin to build, the robin in the homely 
old apple-tree, the oriole in the swaying boughs of 
the elm, to rock with every breeze that blows, the 
sparrow selects the tall ferns or the flowering thorn 
of the pasture, the blossoms of which are as white 
as driven snow, the swallow begins to frequent 
the puddles of the highway, and makes many a 
journey thence to the barn, the bobolink, with his 
inimitable song and hilarious glee, his gay coat 
glistening in the bright sunlight as he scours the 
clover-fields or flies from tree to tree, playing 
the gallant to Mrs. Robert, ending his love-strain 
with 

" Bob-o-link, bob-o-link, 
Spink, spauk, spink, 
Chee, chee, chee ! " 

selects the waving grasses of the smooth mowing- 
lands about the tall black-cherry trees on the tip-top 
of the farm or in the meadows as his base of 
operation ; and what a madcap he is ! the yellow- 
hammer finds a hollow tree and bores his doorway 
through the soft, decaying wood, where he imme- 
diately sets up housekeeping, the bluebirds have 
taken all the tenements in the old martin-house 



IN THE WOODS. 1 13 

on the shed, and all the world is agog with melody. 
I see all these birds in the woods at times, but I 
have never seen the hermit-thrush or wood-thrush 
or the whipporwill on the higher uplands. The 
cuckoo wanders from lowland to upland and back 
again throughout the summer, but, like the thrush 
and whipporwill, he is a shy fellow and does not 
often show himself to strangers. If ever mortals 
reach Elysium, they will find plenty of trees and 
birds I have no doubt. It would not be Blysium 
without them, for of all delightful places on earth 
none are more so than the quiet, sleepy dreamlands 
of the forests. 

When the leaves are gone with the autumn 
winds, we get into closer companionship with the 
trees. Their graceful lines show clearly against 
the hillsides or the sky. It is with them as if the 
drapery had fallen from the nude ideal of the sculp- 
tor, and left it standing in all its native and una- 
dorned beauty. The once round, massy tops have 
lost their mystery ; only the dark evergreens, the 
pines, hemlocks, and spruces, and the thicker firs, 
reaching upward to the sky through the clear 
atmosphere, are still inscrutable, only they disdain 
to tell us of their secret of cro'nest and eyry hidden 
in their gloomy tops. Even in winter the bare 
woods do not seem cold and barren to me, though 
their stout roots are deeply buried in the snows. 
The lichens, which thrive so luxuriantly in sum- 



114 IN THE WOODS. 

mer, now gleam more brightly in vari-colored spots 
up and down the trunks of the trees, and enliven 
their gray coverings with suggestions of rich, warm 
tones. These are always found on the southerly 
sides of the trees, and are as good as the needle 
of the compass to pilot one through their wastes. 
The sunny sides of the scrub-pines and firs are 
warm and cosey places, though the winds blow 
bleakly over the snowy levels, and close under 
their scraggy trunks the bright reds and purples 
of the checkerberry, tufts of evergreen, looking like 
splashes of terre-ve^-t against the warm, brown nee- 
dles beneath, and the glossy-leaved arbutus peeps 
kindly out from under the margin of the white cov- 
erlet of the snow. The woods are always beautiful, 
and to myself they are typical of the highest fonn 
of natural beauty, in winter and summer alike, and 
have abundant charm. They are full of character 
in winter, and break the monotony of the white 
fields ; they shelter the low, drooping eaves of the 
old red farmhouse from the cutting winds and sleet, 
and make weird music in the silences of the winter 
night, sweeter than any I have ever heard else- 
where. They were the lullabys of my childhood, 
and I have never forgotten them. 

Speaking of lichens, I remember of once trav- 
elling on Cape Cod on a late winter day, and step- 
ping from the train at the depot of one of its shore 
towns, of seeing some of the finest specimens on 



IN THE T^OODS. 115 

the elms and stone-walls I had ever met with. On 
the elms there were spots of lichen-growth as broad 
as a man's body and of the color of saffron, and 
on the walls by the road were luxuriant masses of 
them in four colors. I had not time to examine 
them, but I thought it the finest winter display I 
had seen. Never do the silvery ribbons and span- 
gles of the yellow birch look so transparent or 
appear to such advantage as in the sunlight of a 
crisp winter day. 

I sometimes take a day's outing in the woods 
when the snows are deepest. Spread over the 
leaves is this great table-cloth of dimity, and strewn 
from one end to the other with seeds and cones 
of the trees, veritable crumbs Nature has dropped 
for the chickadees who hop over the snow, looking 
like white puff-balls, lunching here and there as 
unconscious of my intrusion as they well can be. 
A whitish-brown rabbit leaps into sight, and setting 
up straightly on his hinder legs takes a good look 
at me and then goes on into the deeper woods. I 
have disturbed a partridge in her burrowing-place 
in the snow, and she whirrs away into the pine 
thickets. The owls make frequent midday flights, 
that are as noiseless as the footsteps of a ghost. 
They are the ghosts of the woods, the wood-birds 
and squirrels give them a wide berth. How sound- 
less the woods at noon in winter. The chickadees 
have gone to sleep in the sun, and onl}- the low 



Il6 IN THE WOODS. 

creak of a limb in the wind overhead or the deep 
bass rumbling of the ice on the pond, as it heaves 
and swells in the throes of the winter frost, — only 
these disturb the dreamer. But the sun is getting 
low, for the winter afternoons go swiftly when one 
is busy with his thoughts or avocation, and I go 
out of the growing shadows of the woods home- 
ward to my open fire, to see my woods again in the 
leaping, crackling flame. It is only at nightfall 
the woods seem dreary, dark, and lonesome-like, 
when their branches spread out like veins of ink 
against the cold, gray tones of a winter sunset, 
when the keen north-wind blows over the hills and 
down the valleys with a breath whose touch is like 
the brand of a hot iron. But if the winter woods 
are beautiful, under the bright, sunny skies of June 
they become realms of enchantment, with their 
delicate odors, their over- arching foliage, their soft 
carpetings of laurel, wood-fern, and partridge-plum, 
of white-petalled wind-flower, and other varieties 
of plant-life. One can well say with Bryant, — 

"The groves were God's first temples, — 
God's ancient sanctuaries." 



SCARE-CROWS. 



Flawless the heart that owns a simple creed 
Built to the plninmet-liiie of hninan need ; 
No slave to idle form or strait-laced sect, 
Content to speak Truth^s coinmon dialect; 
Whose garb is not the thin, worn-oiit veneer 
Of moral pretence, specious or austere. 
But owns the attribute that underlies 
True worth and manly Christian sacrifice. 




SCARE-CROWS. 

[REQUENTI.Y, in the early summer, I find 
myself driving along the country high- 
ways, past sleepy - looking farm-houses, 
more somnolent than ever under the growing stress 
of field-work, and the thick, softly-falling shadows 
of the doorj'-ard elms and maples, — so silent and 
deserted, with all the children at school and all the 
noisy, cackling flocks afield busily hunting grub 
and grasshopper. At intervals along the road the 
district schoolhouse leans its stained boards and 
diminutive window-panes against the birches and 
scarlet sumac of the roadside, and just above the 
window's narrow sill I catch a glimpse of frowzy 
heads and rosy cheeks, of craned necks of boys and 
girls, who peer uneasy-like out into the sunshine, 
longing no doubt for the recess or noon-hour, which 
seems ever far away to the school-urchin. 

I remember years ago seeing by the roadside 
an old deserted schoolhouse, with its unpainted, 
weather-beaten, creaky door, hung by a single butt 
to the pine lintel, hacked and scarred by many a 
boyish blade, half-open and leaning helplessly in 

"9 



I20 SCARB-CROWS. 

over a worn threshold, across which the winter 
and summer storms beat without restraint. The 
snow and rain and the sunbeams were the only 
tenants of this ruin. Its decay touched my heart 
as do the gray hairs and tottering footsteps of the 
village patriarch, and the vandalism of time seemed 
a fitter fate than the vandalism of man. Stranger 
though its threshold was to my boyish feet, this 
low-roofed, blackened building was a hive of tra- 
ditions to many a grown-up boy, and like the 
humming of the bees it sang of bygone daj^s in 
many a homely phrase and pleasant memory ; nor 
was it difficult for me to people its empty desks 
with dwellers, to conjure up the sibilant speech 
of birchen switch, — that scare-crow of relentess 
vigilance, though innocent enough when flaunting 
its tawny bloom by the wayside. 

What a brood of reminiscences comes as I glance 
through the doorway to where a broad beam of 
sunlight falls athwart the sagging floor, so strangely 
silent and lonesome, and so well described by our 
favorite poet : 

"Within, the master's desk is seen, 

Deep scarred by raps ofl&cial ; 
The warping floor, the battered seats, 

The jack-knife's carved initial ; 
The charcoal frescoes on the wall ; 

Its door's worn sill, betraying 
The feet, that creeping slow to school, 

Went storming out to playing." 



SCARB-CROWS. 121 

A homely description to be sure, but full to the 
brim of that pathos which Hngers longest in the 
heart. But there came another picture : 

I saw where poiuts a gilded vane ; 

. Where, dusky-red against the wood 

With shattered sash and window-pane, 
The old-time district schoolhouse stood. 

Hedged in with birch and hackmatack, 

Beside the highway's dusty track, 
Its threshold friendless, thistle overgrown. 
And all its dreams of childish romance flown. 

Where idly swings an open door 

As years ago, when orchard bloom, 
Blown inward o'er its desk and floor, 

Distilled for me a rare perfume ; 
Along whose dingy, crackled walls 
The mellow sunlight slanting falls; 
Where sped the scant three months of winter school, 
That served alike for bookish lad and fool. 

So in mid-revery I drive through still woods to 
catch an occasional drowsy note or sound, and 
down through the hollows, over rattling plank 
bridges, where the sun gets only furtive glances 
at the shallows and ripples of the water beneath, 
and up along the slopes where glisten bits of bright 
tin scraps, whirHng and bobbing in the wind, as 
they hang pendent from a score or two of leaning 
poles amid-field, and round about which is a net- 
work of cotton twine, strung to a hundred stakes 



122 SCARB-CROWS. 

low down among the sprouting blades of corn, and 
in the centre of all is posed the deity of the acre, 
with legs a-straddle and arms outreaching as stiffly 
as their wooden sinews will permit, with old bat- 
tered hat pulled low over an expressionless visage 
of unkempt straw, wrapped about in such garments 
as would dub our scare-crow a disciple of lyord 
Tatters. "What human ingenuity can invent of 
ugliness out of castaway clothing has been made 
into this perfect tramp. I have helped to build 
many a tramp of the cornfield, and it is no wonder 
to myself that the cunning crow has been so easily 
deceived. When the leaves of the oak have grown 
to the size of a mouse's ear the farmer bestirs him 
to plant the Indian-corn. The brown slopes have 
been ploughed and cross-ploughed, harrowed and 
reharrowed, until the soil is as light and mellow 
as meal from the mill; across the acre, from one 
end to the other, old Dobbin has dragged the light 
furrowing-plough, forward and back, back and 
forward, until the whole field looks as if a comb 
with huge teeth had been drawn through the moist, 
warm dirt, and where later in the season will stand 
the stout ranks of waving corn. Over the brown 
earth go the women-folks of the household, with 
their dropping of the precious seed, of golden kernel, 
of bean, and silver disk of pumpkin, and after them 
come the men with broad-bladed hoe to cover-in the 
sowing of the dainty-fingered maid and housewife. 



SCARE-CROWS. 123 

How anxiously the crows scan the laborers their 
frequent flights bear witness as they hover among 
the thick-set apple-trees of the orchard, giving 
vent to their satisfaction with spasmodic laughter, 
but our black carrion scavenger has reckoned with- 
out his host, for ere the morning dawns the ragged 
guardsman is at his post, and the crow still hovers 
among the orchard trees or about the margin of 
the neighboring woodland, pouring out his dis- 
content upon the winds. Sometimes the farmer, 
do as best he can, finds his acre robbed of its seed 
to the half of its planting only to retaliate by rob- 
bing the nest of the robber and hoisting his prey 
of dead crow aslant the sunbeams of the cornfield. 
This done the crows give over their filching until 
fall, when the yellow corn-shocks lend their fatness 
to delay the migrations of these pests of the seed- 
time. One does not have to search the cornfields 
for dummies and scare-crows. Men find their 
neighbors setting them up everj''where, and if I 
remember rightly, the church of a half a century 
ago had its share. The beliefs of my boyhood 
were of the most rugged sort, bordering upon 
asceticism so far as any reasonable pleasure or 
diversion came in question, and the grim philos- 
ophy of redemption of those days kept the scare- 
crow of Fear always in sight. It may be well 
supposed that Orthodoxy came naturally by its 
stern, exacting, angular character. The Puritans, 



1 24 SCARE-CROWS. 

as Emerson said, thrust Beauty out of the meeting- 
house, and shut the door in her face. If there was 
a bleak, windy spot in the settlement, there the 
infant church household was planted, with a creed 
as barren of natural beauty as the edifice wherein 
God was supposed to have taken up his abode, 
and whose walls rang more with denunciation than 
with the welcome tidings of peace and love to 
men. 

I have noticed that religion of one sort and 
another — for like lichens growing up and down 
the trunks of the trees and along the rough faces 
of the boulders in the fields, there are many 
kinds — makes some people very intolerant of 
their neighbor's behavior on Sundays as well as 
on week-days. When a ten-j-ear-old urchin, I 
every Sabbath walked some four miles over a 
dusty, hilly road to the old white meeeting-house 
on the Hill to gratify the orthodox ideas of my 
parents, but whether I derived that benefit which 
was expected of my strict training my trainers 
know best. If there were any lack in a spiritual 
growth, I can testify truthfully that there was no 
lack in a muscular development. The old church 
interior, made up of hard, unjdelding lines, with a 
high pulpit facing the singers, was rich in sugges- 
tion of an unrelenting Deity. The pews were 
marvels of discomfort, with their straight backs 
and narrow seats, and, young as I was, I was ex- 



SCARE-CROWS. 125 

pected to keep my eye on the minister, and to be 
able to repeat a week lience both forenoon and 
afternoon texts, as an evidence of my spiritual 
improvement and precocity. 

Conscience, whetted to a razor-edge, cut every- 
thing that touched its glittering blade. It was the 
scare-crow in the shrunk acre of Sense. Every 
wish of the heart must be filed and docketed with 
the clerk of that Court of Spiritual Monopolies, 
Conscience, where by a process of special pleading 
it was decided where duty ended and diversion 
began. Wide-awake day and sleepy night were 
alike haunted by numberless spooks of condemna- 
tion, indefinable organisms that like motes wa- 
vered up and down in the atmosphere of the soul, 
making perpetual havoc with childhood's day- 
dreams and fancies. It was a strange existence 
for the boy who grew unconsciously into the staid- 
ness of manhood, and whose counterpart was in 
almost every household. Public opinion as re- 
garded church-going was a Force. As for the 
men of those days, he who made any pretension 
to respectability and influence in affairs attended 
church with his famity regularly, — a devout cus- 
tom which has much relaxed in later years, — but 
they who wandered about their farms or lounged 
indolently within the drowsy shadows of their 
orchard trees, were unspiritual vagabonds, men 
hardened in worldliness and sinful neglect, — a state 



126 SCARE-CROWS. 

then regarded as truly lamentable, but now re- 
garded with more leniency. 

Though a boy, I listened with great seriousness 
to the discourse of my elders, as we trudged home- 
ward over the hills from church, concerning the 
spiritual fate of those men whom we might see 
any Sunday in the fields or in the shadows of the 
elms in the lowlands, and one could but note 
the unctuous conceit of my companions as they 
contemplated the certainty of their own salvation, 
and consigned their less devout fellows to the ques- 
tionable mercies of the Devil ; as if God lived alto- 
gether in a meeting-house, and in their own in 
particular ! But creeds and personal beliefs have 
changed with the swift advance of thought, and 
dogmas that once cried themselves hoarse in the 
battle of theologic idiosyncrasies have at last died 
of senility or exhaustion. Men have at last come 
to believe that no structure of human handiwork, 
of human conception for the indwelling of the 
Deity, no matter how solemnly consecrated, takes 
any sanctity other than from the worship of its 
people. The home of the humblest workingman 
may have more of divinity within its kitchen walls 
than the noblest pile of church architecture. The 
hand of man has no especial virtue. Everything 
is prepared for the higher intelligence which is 
his. He adds nothing to what has been given 
him, but Nature is mutilated to serve man's arti- 



SCARE-CROWS. 127 

ficiality ; but Nature iudemnifies herself for all his 
vandalism of saw-mill, of river-dam, of factory, and 
of town. Nothing is proof against the tax which 
Nature levies on all the exaltation of mankind. 
No man has a right to question his neighbor's 
Christianity. The outward measure which men 
take of each other, whether they worship God in 
the richly upholstered pews that border the broad 
aisle of the fashionable church, or whether they 
hold their communion with the Creator, under the 
blue vaults of the church which the Creator built 
for himself, filled with His sunshine, among the 
trees, on the green knolls, where the winds blow 
fresh from the gardens of the woods and mountains, 
and where the choirs are of feathered songsters, 
is not the measure which God writes in the Great 
Book. I have a great admiration for every-day 
religion, such as men carry as they do their dinner- 
pails, and from which men draw humanity, and 
upon which they build up strong, virile manhood 
and hearthood ; but of the kind which people hang 
up in their closets with their Sunday clothes, when 
Sunday is over, I have very little sympathy or 
respect. Religion never thrives upon a field thick- 
set with lifeless images or dummy scare-crows of 
particular rewards and punishments. Cant differs 
greatly from a tender, loving Christian service ; for 
the sanctity with which God wraps himself about 
finds no expression in the long-drawn, distorted 



128 SCARE-CROWS. 

visages and quasi-devout phrases of some of his 
offspring. lyOyalt}- to God, hke a woman's loyalty 
to her tea-kettle, stands for commonplace uses and 
daily application. Rafters, cobv/ebs, and glaring 
frescoes take no semblance of the overarching blue 
which roofs in the cloisters of Nature. Structures 
of wood and stone may gratify human vanitj^, may 
appease human longings where they are sufficiently 
shallow; creeds may hold them together; but the 
Builder of the Universe is above creed or people. 

John Ruskin says no picture .should be painted 
unless it has an outlook, a vista, out through which 
one is led into the Beyond ; that no interior should 
be painted utterly closed in, but there should be 
a door ajar on its lintel, or a window looking out 
upon a bit of blue sky, so that the imagination 
may have some scope for activity. Few men dis- 
pute the immortality of the soul, for, through 
such belief they look up through the wonders of 
creation to the Creator. The lover of Nature 
must, of a truth, be a worshipper at God's altars. 
Touch a single key of the piano, and the harp 
which stands beside it will respond in perfect 
S3'mpathy, but only that string of the harp which 
accords with the note of the piano will answer 
with its vibration. Men who are in sympathy 
with the great Tone constantly sounding through- 
out Nature will find their hearts unconsciously 
thrilled with a willing unison of purpose and de- 



SCARE-CROWS. 129 

sire, unconsciously answering its subtile harmonies, 
unconsciously obedient to the Infinite Hand which 
has so wonderfully laid the foundations of the 
grand cathedrals of the woods and mountains. 
The woods are filled with hosts of unseen wor- 
shippers, the mountains with countless altars whose 
smokes of incense are the white morning mists 
which lie so lightlj^ along the tree-tops, hiding 
the battlements of gra}', turreted stone and filling 
the skies with fleecy clouds. The leaping waters 
that jar the firmly-set rocks, the feet of the ever- 
rising domes, with their tumult and deep rever- 
berations, make the heavy diapason to which all 
other sounds are attuned. Nature's grand mel- 
odies are ever pitched upon the same key-note. 
Nature knows no discord. From ocean depth and 
roar of breaking surf to the light treble of the 
shallows of the mountain brooklet the harmony 
is sustained and its rendering is faultless. God 
sounds the key-note in many a subtile touch of 
color, tone, and form, animate and inanimate, and 
wherever he finds a responsive heart there he 
finds a willing worshipper. ' ' Behold the lilies, ' ' 
said the Great Preacher. 



RAINY DAYS. 



Hear the footsteps of the rain ! 
Fitter, palter. 
Tuneful chatter, 
On the flashing fire-lit pane. 
Hear the honeysuckle creak 
As the winds its secrets seek. 

Twisting through its matted vines. 
And the windows, how they rattle, bang, and batter ! 
Fitter, patter. 
Dripping chatter, 
Tripping down the shingled roof. 
Filling in its liquid woof ; 
How the notes each other throng, 
Making up their slumber-song. 
Full of softly droivsy lines. 
With their drip, and rush, and gush and clatter! 
Fitter, patter. 
Dripping chatter, 
Hear the night-tide of the rain ! 




RAINY DAYS. 

HERE are wet-weather philosophers and 
dry-weather philosophers, each after his 
imaginations and each having his own 
idiosyncrasies, his own conjectures of the utility 
or necessity of the dripping rain, with its concomi- 
tants of muddy highways and wayside brooklets, 
with its dark, lowering storm-clouds, its dense 
fogs and damp, inrolling sea-mists, its leaky roofs 
and balky chimneys that persist in drawing the 
wrong way or not at all, with its out-of-door dis- 
comforts, its enforced inaction, its worry and fret 
of interrupted labor of field or farm. Every dog 
has its day, and so has the rain, and for all its 
disturbance of human plans or pleasures it makes 
ample compensation by its re-enforcement of the 
economies of Nature. Nature is the perfect econo- 
mist. Nothing is ever lost to her. 

Storms come and go, alwa^^s obedient to the 
Unseen, whose higher, broader purposes are too 
often but imperfectly understood by the dwellers 
of earth. Man plans for days ; Nature speaks of 
eternity. Nature is never a borrower, but always 

133 



134 RAINY DAYS. 

a lender, a usurer in the greater sense, exacting a 
sacrifice for every service she renders, emptying 
the skies of their superabundant wet or moisture 
upon the thirsty ground, to withdraw it again in 
slow rising mists to be carried far away, to be 
again poured out upon other fields and forests. 
A rainy day is a blessing to men as to plants and 
trees, the fields and woods, and there is a zest 
in the down-pouring rain, the slow draining of the 
clouds, which leaves earth the richer in promise 
than before its coming. What is more delightful 
than with broad-brimmed tarpaulin and water-proof 
coat and boots to stand out in the clearing or to 
wander in the woods or meadows when the big 
drops come chasing down the sky, — a flood of 
crystal wet, whipping the brooks and puddles 
into thick foam, beating their soft reveille upon 
the leaves of the trees, making the clover blossoms 
drunk with satiety, and filling the cups of the 
garden-flowers to the brim with sweet nectar ! 
The falling of the rain on the roof, its drip-drip 
among the vines that hide the weather-stains on 
the old farmhouse, its low-voiced monody as it 
beats against the windows are idyllic sounds. A 
rainy day is one of Nature's poems set to the 
charming rhythm of dripping tree-tops and of noisy, 
babbling streams. 

The roads have grown white under the ardent 
glances of the summer sun ; the trees by the road- 



RAINY DAYS. 13^ 

side, tlie shapely shrubbery and arbor- vitse of the 
hedges, have put on the dusty coat of the miller, 
the mulleins in the pasture have the look of thirsty 
wayfarers along the margins of the broad ledges, 
the leaves of the fragrant-scented sv/eet-ferns have 
the warm brown color of autumn, with so much 
of sunshine and so little of dew, the lichens along 
the walls and fences are shrunken and dried up 
with scarcity of drink, and look old and faded, and 
the corn-leaves are as tightly curled as the paper 
lamplighters I used to make in boyish amusement 
before the days of brimstone matches, when it was 
an unwished-for episode to have the hearth grow 
fireless and cold amid its gray heap of scattered, 
dying embers. 

The dry, silent days have grown monotonous ; 
the birds have lost voice ; only the shrill, arid music 
of the cicada, the sharp, disturbed snapping of 
grasshopper wings, as one wanders about the dis- 
couraged fields, breaks the monotony of quiet. 
How patiently the field-flowers wait, with up- 
turned faces, for the coming of the rain ! Night 
after night the sun has gone down behind the far- 
off hills, a ball of fire ; but all things end, and so 
does a spell of dry weather. To-day the cuckoo 
has been singing in the lowlands all the long 
forenoon, 

" Cuckoo ! cuckoo ! cuckoo ! " 

his swift-recurring notes ending always with a 



136 RAINY DAYS. 

falling inflection ; the swallows, from dawn to twi- 
light, have been wheeling and skimming above the 
green carpet of the fields, darting in and out, up 
and down, over and through the trees of the or- 
chard, and toward sundown the robins in the 
swamp maples have been saying, with a sort of 
musical intonation, 

"Tilopy, tilopy, tolopy, toplady, toplady, 
Tut-tut-tut," 

whistling rain to the gray clouds in the west that 
have at last hidden the hot sun. There is a trace 
of the coolness of the woods which comes up over 
the slopes with the south-wind. There is a strange, 
uncomfortable moisture in the air and about the 
face and hands, a rawness in the atmosphere which 
is a sure monition of coming wet. The frogs in the 
water-grass by the river croak their satisfaction in 
a dismal sort of way. Sounds come from a great 
distance with marvellous distinctness, and seem 
near at hand. Unconsciously we mark their indi- 
viduality of voice, the sharp concussion of hammer, 
and the closing of door. 

The stream is like a mirror, with only an occa- 
sional ripple as the wind freshens from the sea, 
blurring the sharp lines and angles of the house- 
tops and red chimneys and the shapely domes of 
the elms scattered along its banks, of the black, 
disused wharves and low, tumble-down warehouses, 



RAINY DAYS. 



^17 



which mark the upper limits of the old fishing- 
town, so faithfully reproduced in the inverse upon 
the dusky, azure sky, delicately painted upon the 
river's surface. The lights of the vessels come 
out one by one amid their rigging and slender spars, 
which stand out sharply against the narrow streak 
of darkening gray above the hills. The house-lights 
follow those of the river, the fishing-sloops and 
schooners, so lonesome and silent amid-stream, like 
answering signals, and reach down into the depths 
of the waters with tremulous arms of fire. The 
woods grow black and stark along the uplands, and 
over all hangs a single star, while wraiths of wet 
sea-fog roll in over the narrow bay and blow up 
stream, and behind which the dimly-gleaming lights 
play at hide-and-seek. A lonely whippoorwill fills 
the woods with plaintive echoes, the far-away hoot 
of an owl fills in the bass with a deep, sepulchral 
note. The frogs have not yet done their croaking, 
but the winds are rising higher, and the tree-tops 
moan and make weird songs ; the vines rattle about 
the windows, and the air is filled with uncanny 
speech. The rain is coming. The Spirit of the 
Clouds is passing over, and the world is silent at 
last. It is the prelude of the storm, the dumb 
presage of the dripping winds. 

The lights go out along the highways, and the 
fireflies hang gleaming lamps in the tall wet grass, 
that blink and glisten in the dark like far-oflf stars, 



138 RAINY DAYS. 

and with bedtime we creep up the narrow, creaky- 
stair to our rest under the low rafters of the old 
farmhouse, where the boys have always slept since 
its roof-tree was planted ; but ere the midnight 
hour there come pattering rain-footsteps, lightsome 
like, on the moss-grown roof, a tapping of wet 
fingers on the garret windows in the peaked gable. 
A feathered watcher in the chimney has caught 
the lullaby of the storm, and wakes his family of 
swallows to hear the news ; and what a cavernous 
uproar they make for the moment ! The prelude 
of the sounding rain along the matted tops of the 
woods comes in through the half-raised window, 
and, few moments later, there is a rush of storm- 
sprites across the fields and up over the eaves and 
through the swaying elms that overtop the smoke- 
less chimneys ; and we again lapse into slumber, to 
dream of meadows white with bloom, of brooks and 
singing shallows and speckled trout, of wet, drip- 
ping woods, of fragrant pines and silver mists. 
O the magic of the rain ! O for the youth whose 
sleep was never so sound as when the besom of the 
storm swept the hills and vales of childhood, pull- 
ing all the stops in the great organ of Nature wide 
open ; and what grand, soulful music of the upper 
skies came down to dwell for a day in the hearts 
of men ! 

' ' I shut my eyes, and see as in a dream 
The friendly clouds drop down spring \4olets 



RAINY DAYS. 1 39 

And summer columbines, and all the flowers 
That tuft the woodland floor, or overarch 
The streamlet : spiky grass for genial June, 
Brown harvests for the waiting husbandman, 
And for the woods a deluge of fresh leaves," 

and for the heart of man a sweet, refreshing rest. 
But Hfe is not all of poetic imaginings, nor is a 
wet day all of tripping, dripping rain-measitres 
and rain-songs to the farmhouse. It sends the 
men to the blacksmith with the unshod horses 
and broken tools, or to the miller with a grist, 
and from thence to the village store for an hour's 
chat with a score of other farmers who have 
come down to the village smithy or to the mill 
upon similar errands. I have very vivid recol- 
lections of the rainy-day rides to the village with 
the wagon set up high on its thoroughbrace 
springs, made of thicknesses of sole-leather, and 
piled full of leathern bags filled with corn and 
wheat ; and of myself perched atop of all with 
a hugh blue umbrella to keep off the wet. It 
was a good long ride through the woods and 
over the hills, and I well remember the drenched 
look of everything as we went on our way, and 
especially of the bushes where the rain torrents 
had washed the leaves and soil from their roots, 
leaving them brown and bare. I had always to 
walk up the hills, which was as much a principle 
of humanity as- any other which was taught me 



140 RAINY DAYS. 

in my boyhood; and it was a welcome sound to 
drive across the narrow plank-bridge at the head 
of the mill-pond, for there I got a glimpse of the 
old brown clap-boarded grist-mill, whose muffled 
song of whirring, whirling stones had ever a great 
charm for me. The miller was a little weazened, 
dried-up old man, most silent withal; and between 
his huge quid of tobacco and his perpetual fum- 
bling of the meal hot from the stones, his taking 
toll and his monosyllabic utterances, he seemed 
to be a species of dusty-coated automata. Not 
the least of my boyish interest and curiosity was 
aroused as I watched the endless leather belt with 
its tiny cups of tin filled to the brim with the 
yellow grains of the crushed corn that a moment 
before went into the big hopper to slowly trickle 
down into the centre of the great burr-stones; 
and how swiftly the tin cups chased each other 
up the square wooden spout to come down on 
the opposite side to be emptied through a wooden 
run into the bag tied to its nozzle ! It was a 
boyish wonderment of mine how the meal was so 
deftly gotten into these cups; but one dull day I 
caught the miller "picking" his stone, and it 
was a secret no longer. Not far off was the 
smithy, and I could catch the sound of its ring- 
ing hammer marking time with almost perfect 
rhythm above the whir of the dusty miller's grind- 
ing. The miller and the smith had both of them 



RAINY DAYS. I4I 

cosey nooks for their work-dwellings, — one beside 
the highway and the other above the cool, brim- 
ming flumes of the stream which shone always 
by day like liquid emerald. 

'Twixt the planted lands and clover bloom 

Adown the steep of the village hill, 
Past clustered gable and sloping roof 

Runs the broad highway to stream and mill. 
The smithy stood just across the road, 

Beside it a larch-tree swung aloft 
Its brawny branches in storm and sun. 

To make in the summer the robin's croft. 

Heigh-ho, a blow, and the anvil rings 

With a clink, clank, and the ruddy brand 
Throws far and wide its fiery hail 

As the smith lets fall his good right hand; — 
A freakish, fidgety, raw-boned man, 

With silvery hair and wrinkled face, 
Whose nose was built on so spare a plan 

His spectacles scarce could keep their place. 

I see him now, as in childhood days. 

Sorting old iron beside his door, — 
A score of shoes on the pegs arow. 

The cobwebbed rafters and slivered floor. 
The rickety bellows wheeze and blow, 

Then the sea-coal forge-fire bums up clear. 
The metal 's aheat with white-hot glow, — 

Clink, clank, clink the noisy song I hear. 

I/ike the gray horse in the pictures of a certain 
Flemish artist, there was ever a vagabondish- 



142 RAINY DAYS. 

looking urchin squatted close under the sagging 
rail, on the outer edge of the river bridge, with 
heels dangling over the water, fishing with crooked 
alder-pole, such as I myself had cut many a time, — 
trout seemed ever to have a partialitj'- for a homely 
alder- rod in those days ! — and such as one sees by 
the side of the meadow-brooks as you get to the 
woods, where it has been thrown by the rustic 
angler as he has turned his footsteps homeward. 
"What hosts of conjectures come with the glimpse 
of one of these cast-away fishing-poles, cut from 
the alder-swamp by some angler on his way to 
the meadows, half hidden in the tall grass, looking 
somewhat like a water-snake of extraordinary size ; 
but I am ever full of conjecture as to what its 
owner was like, and whether he had any sort of 
luck. This urchin always eyed me with a sort of 
lazy askance, and bobbed his hook patientlj^ amid 
a school of indifferent chub and perch, — their heads 
all to the current, so motionless within the shad- 
ows of the logs which choked the narrow channel 
of the mill-pond, the play-ground of the more ven- 
turesome village lads. In eastern Maine I have 
many a time seen the country women and lassies 
crossing the Penobscot river upon the ' ' drives ' ' 
of spruce and pine which had come from the forests 
far inland, going over them as unconscious of 
danger apparently as if they had been a highway 
of corduroy well set in terra firma. Eastward lay 



RAINY DAYS. 1 43 

the broad expanse of the pond outlet which fed 
the mill-stream in drouth and wet, and above its 
rock)^ margin towered the pine-clad dome of Quito 
Mountain, every tree and rock of which were 
photographed in these crystal waters below with 
every still morning; but on rainy days only the 
slaty color of roughened waters is seen with 
never a hint of mountain or sky ; only the com- 
motion of thick-falhng drops, the bufifetings of 
gusty winds which drive the flying spray over 
the sandy ruts of the low shore road are here. 
How much there is to see between the down- 
falling drops of bright enlivening tones of gray, 
red, and yellow and dun-hued mosses on tree and 
rock and fence, of pasture shrub and woodland as 
full of vigorous, charming color as a boy's face 
fresh from a cold bath, the rainy-day philosopher 
will tell you. 

On the farm the rainy day is a day of odds and 
ends of labor, — of mending yokes and harnesses 
and of making ready for the haymakers, of cob- 
bling the children's shoes, and of aiding the house- 
wife here and there indoors. There was ever 
enough to do; but when the round of small work 
was completed, it was a day of lounging about the 
open fire which has been started in the dingy brick 
fireplace, where the fire has burned so many winter 
evenings brightly through, to take off the damp 
chill of the storm and not less to abate the sombre- 



144 RAINY DAYS. 

ness of the lurking indoor shadows, and when the 
housewife hums lightly to the music of her spin- 
ning-wheel, whirling it back a bit, and then round 
and round in the warm blaze of the glowing 
hearth, — 

"A farmer's work is from sun to sun, 
But a woman's work is never done." 

It was considered rather an accomplishment for 
the farm-boy to be able to make a good ' ' waxed- 
end," to draw an even thread, and to drive a peg 
without splitting or breaking it. The old shoe- 
bench was one of the romances of the household, 
and afforded me in my earlier years an unfailing 
source of amusement. It sat out in the old well- 
room, and never have I been by it in later years, — 
for the same old bench is there still ! — but I stop 
to take a draught from the old hemlock well-curb 
opposite it; and what a magic there is in its crystal 
depths to bring back the recollections of far-off 
days ! As abundant romance clustered, by way 
of many an association, about the old black lap- 
stone which had come down from long-gone gen- 
erations, and which I used to get out on winter 
nights, and upon which I would crack a dish of 
butternuts by the firelight. The broad-faced shoe- 
hammer was the favorite for this firelight pastime, 
but it was with hesitation that its owner loaned it 
to the children for such idle usage. Its generous- 
hearted proprietor has been laid to rest with his 



RAINY DAYS. 145 

ancestors in the hillside burying-ground, but the 
old shoe-bench, the lapstone, the clumsy wooden 
clamps, and the old black knee-strap, are in their 
accustomed places, — silent, yet full of olden story. 
As I think of them I can see a quiet farmhouse, 
its outer walls white as snow in the summer sun- 
light, its bright green blinds closed to temper the 
summer heat which falls so prone upon the low- 
lands at the foot of the orchard-slopes. Across 
its narrow threshold is the domain of homely 
comfort and of ideal country living. It is past 
noon; the dinner has been " cleared away," and 
a dreamy stillness, akin to its wide fireplace and 
high wainscoted walls, has settled over the house 
affairs. The old clock has just struck its two 
strokes past midday, and ticks away in sober fashion 
after its wont, sounding loud in the drowsy silence 
of the summer afternoon. The master is taking 
his well-earned nap, his face well covered with a 
bandanna of generous dimensions. The sun lies 
broadly over the pasture, with its narrow cape of 
pines reaching out from the swamp-lands. The 
song-birds are hardly yet awake for their afternoon 
recital, and the lov/ hum of the honey-bees, whose 
homes lie just within the shadows of the old Non- 
such apple-trees, is hardly more than a suggestion 
of sound. A passing team up the wdiite line of the 
road breaks the monotony of this pastoral dream- 
land. Farther up the hill is the square house. 



146 RAINY DAYS. 

old fashioned, with low hip-roof, its bright-red 
chimneys overtopping the dark foliage of the trees 
which cluster about it ; and below, marking the 
line of the meadows, is a trail of azure, the mere 
suggestion of a summer mist. Nothing lives in 
the heart of the true man or woman like the sweet 
memories of the old homestead ; for 

"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home," — 

no recollections so tender, so heart-touching, as 
of the days of childhood. 

When we were not off to the miller's or to the 
smith)^, we had other and abundant means of 
hastening the going of these rainy days. When 
we had rummaged the attic and the old shed 
chambers to our heart's content, for the thousandth 
time in search of something new, we would betake 
ourselves to the barn. The barn could tell manj^ 
secrets of boyish mischief, but we were never tired 
of its fragrant hay-mows, the wild leaps from its 
broad beams, or our boyish clamberings over the 
low scaffolds after the nests of the loud-cackling 
hens. Their noisy clamor was always the signal 
for a hunt, and we used to wonder that they could 
not keep their secret better. I can never forget 
the strange sensations of my first leap from the 
great beams! My breath seemed to be leaving me 
forever. I seemed to be flying through unbounded 
space; but upon emerging from the loose hay 



RAINY DAYS. 1 47 

beneath it was only to repeat the enchanting 
pastime. I remember of my barn exploits my first 
detected game of "high, low, jack," played with 
some of the boys from a neighbor's on the high 
seat of the old-fashioned thoroughbrace wagon, 
and how father caught me in the act. Cards were 
tabooed at the house, as they were commonly in 
those days of strict orthodoxy, and all my playing 
had been so far of a clandestine character. I ex- 
pected a severe reproof, but instead of that came 
the quiet suggestion: "Boys, if you must play 
cards, you will find a good fire and plenty of 
welcome at the house." We were thunderstruck 
at such evidence of heres}^, and the raciness of the 
adventure was gone at once ; the cards were put 
up, and we began anew our vaulting from the dim 
shadows of the roof. The keen edge of our pleas- 
ure in that direction was forever gone, forever 
dulled. What noisy fluttering and disquietude 
was there among the swallows that had built 
their homes of mastic under the rafters of the 
barn interior ; what silvery bars of dust stretched 
slanting downward from its wall ; but in the bright 
summer sunshine these 

Shadow-haunted barns 
Shot through and through with creviced gold, 

Their broad beams hung with knotted yarns 
That spiders spin, ancestral mould, 

Adorned with many a quaint design 



148 RAINY DAYS. 

Of filmy, geometric line, 
With scented mows, and ample, clean-swept floors 
Of Norway pine within their wide-thrown doors, 

are charming places to dream away the lagging 
hours of afternoon. No bed of down is now so 
restful as the ' ' scented mows ' ' of the cool barn 
shadows seemed in those far-off da}'S. It is a 
different place, when the threshers have set up their 
machine, when its sweet atmosphere is clogged and 
choked with the thickest of stifling dust ; but even 
the threshing was full of anticipated interest for 
the youngsters. 

On rainy days we often went from the sports 
of the old weather-stained barn to the woods and 
meadows. What zest of trouting comes with the 
rain, and what charming pictures, what rich, gray 
harmonies of color come and go with the lifting 
or thickening of the mists on the meadows, with 
a stray bit of sunshine between ! A rainy day in 
the country is full to the brim with rare enjoy- 
ments, with rare effects of atmosphere and brilliant 
color-tones, and v.'ith clear, ringing sounds about 
the farmhouse ; but within the woods there is 
only the dripping leaves and what quaint bars of 
Nature's music the falling rain-drops make. What 
subtile melody is woven out of these tripping rain- 
footsteps ! 

Rainy weather is not to be thought of as some- 
thing to be endured, but the rather as something 



RAINY DAYS. 1 49 

to be enjo)'ed, and they who enjoy its coming 
most have most of large-heartedness and gener- 
osity ; and thej^ who are most impatient of storm 
and wet are the more selfish and unreasoning. 
The sun and rain are the truest benefactors of 
mankind, and the ancients who were guilty of the 
worship of the elements had much of reason in 
their religion. The rain-shod winds breathe the 
rarest poetry of the summer, and with a fund of 
good spirits out of doors and a bright, snapping, 
blazing fire on the open hearth indoors, is com- 
pleted one of the most charming of country pas- 
torals. The lover of the cool, slant-dripping rain 
is a sure friend to humanity. 



AMONG THE HILLS. 



Thick-set with spikes of spruce and pine, 

Old Kiarsarge'' sharpened do7ne grew dark ; 
Above the swamp-fog's level line 

The pasture-bars stood still and stark ; 
While from the poplars in the wall 
Came, shrilly blown, the night-bird''s call, 
And mid the roadside clover, tall and damp. 
The firefly swung his dimly-lighted lamp. 

Beside the farvihousc door, wide-stepped. 

The cricket played a lively tune ; 
His droning song the beetle kept. 

The sivamp-frog brought his cracked bassoon. 
The whippoorwill his piccolo. 
The veery satig a rare solo ; 
While in the smouldering -west a single gliffimering light 
Shone do7vn the mysterious pathway of the night. 

In the swift-falling dusk we sazv 

The low-hung censer of the moon 
Swing pendent from this single star. 

To downward dip and sink too soon 
Its crescent flame and sharp outline 
Behind far Conway's ribs of pine, — 
Nature's mute prophecy of Summer's hottest days. 
Of trailing river fogs and thirsty water-ways. 



AMONG THE HILLS. 

^^%[UCH is the recollection of many a sum- 
mer twilight among the beautiful pine- 
clad hills of New Hampshire, so noted for 
their clear, bracing atmosphere, their rugged come- 
liness, their loft)^ crests hidden amid the flying 
clouds ; their music of crystal trout-streams leaping 
headlong down through the hemlocks and singing 
pines, skirting the winding highwaj^s of the moun- 
tains hemmed in with fretted margins of fragrant 
wood-blossoms and aromatic ferns ; of wuld-rose 
and purple elderberry ; and over-roofing all these 
woodland and mountain haunts are their bright 
azure skies. 

One must know them and their By-ways as he 
does the ways and inclinations of a cherished 
friend. The tie which binds one to Nature must 
be closely and tenderly knit. One must linger 
by her side as the lover does by the side of 
the maid, reading her caprice and wilfulness by 
the intuition of the heart. To such and such 
only does Nature reveal her secret ways. Bur- 
roughs says, speaking of his finding out the 
ways of the dwellers of the woods, the whippoor- 

153 



154 AMONG THE HIIvIvS. 

wills, the cuckoos, and the thrushes, that one must 
have all these in his heart, in order to see them 
as he goes among their haunts. To be sure one 
stumbles on these treasures sometimes, but their 
discovery is not the less delightful because unan- 
ticipated or unlooked for. As for myself, I never 
go into the woods or fields but what I seem to be 
in aimless search of something, and so whatever 
I find brings with it a more or less perfect sense 
of compensation. Bird-life and insect-life are full 
of interest and fascination, and they tell charming 
stories of instinct and intelligence; and their move- 
ments are full of constant surprises, even to those 
who know them best. The big-bodied humble- 
bee of the fields and meadows, his coat slashed 
with gold and black velvet, with pollen-covered 
wings, probing the pink-hued tubes of the field- 
clover for their nectar, while the wind sways both 
bee and clover blossom to and fro like a child in 
a swing ; the ant-carpenter sawing away diligently 
at a twig or leaf, making lumber for the building 
and finishing of his house ; the gray field-spider 
setting his filmy trap for a dinner or a breakfast, 
or else dragging his prey into his funnel-shaped 
den to sup upon at his leisure, are all abundant 
in attractions, and are but two or three of the 
hosts of magicians who make the study of Nature 
so charming. 

I have sat many an hour at various times in the 



AMONG THE HII.LS. 155 

shadow of the low watering-shed by the roadside 
at the foot of the long, time-frequented cow-lane, 
on June afternoons, watching the yellow-winged 
butterflies coming in from the sunshine to drink 
of the water of the hillside as it gurgled up from 
the bottom of the wooden trough where the stand- 
pipe entered it, with noisy bubblings of crystal 
air-cells. And with them came the barn-swallows 
to wet their cement, and then to fly swiftly away to 
the shadowy rafters and low-reaching eaves of the 
stables and brown barns. What busy architects 
they were, and with what infinite patience they 
fastened straw to straw, shaping their nests securely 
and symmetrically against the hemlock boarding, — 
a row of adobe dwellings reaching from gable to 
gable along the shadowed eaves ! and what a chat- 
tering of bird-gossip they made as they hurried 
back and forth over the narrow lane which led 
from the barns to the highway ! What dainty 
linings of horse-hair and feather for the carpeting 
of their nests do these winged housekeepers weave ; 
what soft, downy beds are made up for the little 
swallows that are so soon to peck their way out of 
the thin shells ! 

Many a time, while walking along the highway, 
I have stopped beside the puddles made by a 
recent shower to count the butterflies, — these 
brilliantly colored, yellow insect-blossoms of the air, 
as they alighted one by one along their margins 



156 AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

or gathered about the flower of the stubby bull- 
thistle, sipping its scant sweets, — and which looks 
for all the world like a pink tassel growing upside 
down. I have many a time wished to know why 
the thistle is clothed in such formidable array of 
lance and Briarian-needled leaf, this outlaw of the 
fields. Nature is full of life : is life itself, warm 
and palpitating. There is little to choose whether 
you stray amid the fields or try the mountain-side. 
In the mountains is solitude but for the amber 
shallows and azure-tinted cascades of the brooks, 
— of rushing streams, out of the icy coolness of 
whose leaping floods I have drunk many a time ; 
and in whose clear, limpid currents I have angled 
whole days through, always with excellent luck ; 
and so much do they seem like old acquaintance, 
that I never go among them but I feel them to 
be instinct with Soul. I feel that they know me 
for a devout worshipper at their rugged shrines. 
With what gorgeous apparel do they array them- 
selves, these royal hills, in honor of my visit ! 
What aureoles of silvery, filmy cloud and of 
bright golden sunshine are girded about their 
stateliness ! What fragrant breaths of summer 
winds do they exhale or blow down their deep 
woody valleys, and what sharp, slant javelins of 
summer showers drop down from their bronzed 
summits ! What resonant speech of the thunder 
comes down from towering rock and broken crag ; 



AMONG THE HILLS. 157 

what deep mutterings of auger lie pent up within 
their cavernous chambers ! With what thrilHng 
characters of molten flame do they write their 
mandates upon the clouds ! 

Tennyson is right. This grandeur of mountain 
summit and outline, this magnificence of forest 
dress, these monster pines and spruces, these hoary 
Druids of the woods, these swiftly flowing waters, 
this breathing, ever-existent life of bird and insect, 
of fish and fowl, these impressive silences, are but 
the apparitions of the great Force which is uni- 
versal. The woods are full of familiar nooks and 
tree-trunks, and speak of many pleasant experi- 
ences, of many delightful fishing episodes and 
hunting excursions ; and yet they look differently 
to me at each visit. The conditions are never 
twice alike of light and shadow or of animate 
existence. Only the bald tops or the hills are 
the same, and yet their hues are ever changing 
under the swift-flying shadow of bellying cloud-sail 
and wreathing mists, as light as thistle-down and 
white hke thin drifting snows. What puffed out 
cheeks the mountain clouds have on bright, light 
days ! What iridescent colors play along their 
edges which lie uppermost and outermost, and 
what soft, rich tones of purple and slaty grays 
mark their lower lines. What a Painter is He who 
lays in the body of all this rich color of rainbow 
tint ! What a Master He who weaves the mar- 



158 AMONG THE HILLS. 

vellous texture of the clouds with His shuttle of 
the winds ; what snowy webs are turned out 
of the looms of the warm, life-giving sunshine ! 
What a wide-open book for men to read, this out- 
of-door life is ! How much there is to see in these 
tramping-grounds of Nature, and how much there 
is to learn ! The ground is written over in all 
directions with intelligible signs for men's deciph- 
ering. The bee-hunter follows the sugar-eater 
through the woods, up over the hills, down into 
the swamps, until the rover's home is found ; the 
sportsman marks his game to cover as unerringly 
in the thickest of woods as in the open of the 
fields. The fox-hunter has all the instinct of 
his hound, but not his power of scent : a day's 
tramp leads him to the den of the wily Reynard 
on some far-away hillside. He has translated the 
language of signs insomuch that he holds the se- 
crets of this wariest and shrewdest of Nature's 
children. Nature has an alphabet of her own, but 
it is one that is easily learned if one puts his heart 
to the learning of it. 

A few days ago I had occasion to take the 
Eastern Express, and as I went flying past field 
and farmhouse I noticed much that set me to 
thinking of this very habit which some men have 
in so great degree of making comparisons wherever 
Nature enters into the consideration of the matter, 
the habit which some men have so much culti- 



AMONG THE HIIvLS. 159 

vated of reading a chapter as it were from Nature 
ever>^ day, every day gleaning something new 
from her wide-open page. The more one reads 
the more fascinated he becomes and the more loth 
he is to drop the uncut leaves for the more 
prosaic ruts of common living. The msLny little 
dream of the superabundant life about them, and 
which washes with its tide, hardly ever at rest, 
the ver}^ door-stones at our thresholds, which lives 
under the same roof, warming itself at our hearth- 
stones with the cricket and the spider. What 
secrets of loosely woven fabric has this silent spin- 
ner of the out-of-the-way corners, which may be 
had for the watching, escaping even the keen- 
eyed housewife in her daily rounds of sweeping 
and dusting. What accurate adjustment of plan, 
what perfection of design and detail, this insect 
shows us in the building of his filmy web. How 
like the shadows that lurk in and about the walls 
and ceilings of our room are the warp and woof 
of his domicile. What an elusive creature is the 
chirping cricket when the fires blaze up on the 
hearth in the early autumn. How shrilly he pipes 
his single note as the pine-knots crackle between 
the old-fashioned iron-dogs when the first frosts 
have whitened the lowlands. What rare company 
this singer made for our childhood days playing 
at hide-and-seek the whole evening through. How 
silentty he kept his hiding through the day, to come 



l6o AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

out with the dusk and glow of the stars as merry 
voiced as ever, and when the coals were well raked 
over he went to bed with us and sang us to sleep. 
He is the ventriloquist who played us many a 
prank and quip of sound, and led us many a wild- 
goose chase over the sanded floors and up the 
creaking stairway that led with short, steep steps 
to the big open chamber redolent with the smell 
of golden corn and fragrant herb which hung pend- 
ent from the low sloping rafters. What a beautiful 
black shiny coat he wore, and what an elegant fit 
his tailor gave him of close-fitting breeches, and 
what a graceful little fellow he looked when we 
were fortunate enough to find him hugging the 
shelter of some nook or cranny in the rough hem- 
lock boarding of the attic floor. His art of secret- 
ing himself was little short of magic to us ; but 
whenever we had captured him we let him go un- 
injured, and then he would light himself to bed by 
a ray of mellow moonlight which had stolen its 
way into our company through the closely woven 
foliage of the over-arching elms which sheltered 
the roof from storm and sun. We were never 
allowed to carry a candle into the attic at night, 
and it was only when mother came up to see that 
we were well tucked in, that the flickering light 
of the homely tallow- dip glanced along the smooth 
pine rafters, making weird shadow-pictures here 
and there, and which lingered in the brain long 



AMONG THE HILLS. l6l 

after the door had closed at the foot of the stairs. 
A whippoorwill used to come into the orchard at the 
back of the farmhouse, where through the mid- 
summer night he would entertain our wakeful 
hours with his singularly plaintive notes. Some- 
times the water- thrush would come to the edge 
of the pasture and pour out upon the silence of the 
night a nocturne of marvellous melody. Even 
now the notes go floating through my brain as 
clearly as I heard them so long ago. I have heard 
the water-thrush many a time since, and the beauty 
of this bird's song is not less wonderful now 
than then. 

This day which had started me eastward toward 
the Maine hills had opened delightfully warm and 
sunny, but at noon as I left the cit}^ the sky was 
overcast : there was a threat of rain in the low- 
hanging clouds which shut so closely down over 
the woods, the gray flats, and shore sands to sea- 
ward, and over the hills inland. Hardly an hour 
had elapsed and the rain began to beat a sharp 
tattoo on the monitor roof and to trickle down the 
opposite car window. How much there was to see 
even in the rain ! At one hamlet a little ofi" the 
highway a bluff-looking farmer, tall and grizzly- 
bearded, was mending his pump by the barnyard 
gate. He never looked up as the train passed, 
but seemed deeply absorbed in his labor. It was 
a quaint picture, this old man in his shirt-sleeves, 



1 62 AMONG THE HILLS. 

working in the rain with hammer and saw, so 
indifferent to the rushing, roaring train which 
brought him the news from the outer world. A 
little farther on I saw a man walking down the 
slope of his planted lands with his hoe over his 
shoulder. In his walk and bearing he was the 
personification of that independence which is ever 
associated with farm-life, — with its sunshine, bright, 
warm, and generous, its breezy pine-flavored winds, 
its wide outlooks on stormy days, its clear, invigor- 
ating atmosphere, and its dreamy summer twilights. 
Country quiet is to some people a synonyme for 
dulness, but it is a far remove from dulness. In 
the country everj^thing is full of life, even to the 
fungi-covered timbers half-hidden in the tall grasses 
of the roadside. This is Nature's domain, and her 
drones and workers seem not less a part of the 
world than its human kind. I have no doubt but 
my stalwart farmer knight has ploughed in the 
same field of philosophy, getting about the same 
yield per acre as myself; it would be surprising if 
he did not, for he looks a sensible man every inch 
of him, as most farmers do. What makes a man 
more sensible than 

"To plough and to sow. 
To reap and to mow," 

with understanding and diligence ? 

The corn rows ran up and down the hill as 



AMONG THE HILLS. 1 63 

straightly as chalk-lines, and our farmer was read- 
ing Nature's prognostics from his bulletin of brown 
dirt, of wet-dripping clouds, and of low-sweeping 
swallows dodging the drops here and there. The 
rain was singing him a song of life and of bounti- 
ful harvests as he trudged thoughtfully between 
the sprouting, growing corn, his great boots clogged 
with the moist earth. What a magnificent phy- 
sique our farmer had ! and what mattered it if he 
did get a wetting ? This is what he calls ' ' growing 
weather." No doubt his philosophy was broader 
by far than that of the discontented travellers who 
were leaving him so swiftly behind. 

There is a deal of human destiny crowded into 
these long railway trains which go rushing by 
hillside farm and country hamlet with their long 
trail of dense smoke to mark their way by day, 
and which is so luminous in the falling darkness, 
and which wake the echoes of sleepy cities in the 
deep of night with their shrill alarm of whistle 
and reverberant roar. How tireless is the mecha- 
nism of man's invention, that hurries To-day into 
To-morrow ; that knows no weariness of day or 
night, no division of time as it speeds on its journey 
toward the sunrise or sunset ! How can one be 
indifferent to this flying Mercury, whose gleaming 
pathway reaches out into the hills and forests and 
out over the plains like a network of so many 
human spiders' weaving? Here is a romance in 



1 64 AMONG THE HIIvIvS. 

iron indeed ! A romance of ores, of dingy work- 
shops, of glowing red-hot forges, of the modern 
Vulcan and hi^ army of trained helpers, of ponder- 
ous trip-hammers and broad-armed cranes that loom 
up through the yellow, smoky atmosphere of the 
foundery like giant gallows ; a romance of noisy, 
bustling industries which set in motion the wheels 
of the world ; a romance of armored ship, and all 
the enginery of war and conquest ; a romance of 
glittering wealth and luxury. 

But what flying pictures one gets from the swiftly 
moving train! What glimpses of quiet homestead 
closel}^ nestled under the shadows of hillside slopes, 
of broad intervales and inland ponds. I have just 
passed one of those tiny lakelets so common in 
Maine landscapes. Beside its woody margin stand 
two urchins, barefooted, with trousers rolled high 
above their knees. One of them is fishing with 
a crooked birch pole. I can tell it b)^ its dirty- 
white bark. The little fellow has thrown his line 
out into the blue ripples which come inshore with 
the wind, while the smaller urchin is trimming the 
crotched top of an alder-sprout for a "string" 
on which to carry their spoils of silvery chub and 
iridescent perch. They are evidently at the be- 
ginning of their sport, and it does not seem so 
many 5^ears ago when I was the boyish counter- 
part of these young Waltons. I began my fishing 
with a bit of twine string and a bent pin for a 



AMONG THE HILI^S. l6$ 

hook. Minnows and boys have natural affinities. 
Boys begin with fishing for minnows and trout, 
but end later on in life with fishing for men and 
fortunes ; but men, like trout, are wary and sus- 
picious, and fortunes are elusive. Not every fisher 
of men is successful, but human nature in the boy 
and man is markedly similar. Both are made up 
of like traits which are carried through life without 
other change than that of natural development 
according to circumstance and opportunity. The 
narrow brooklet which went singing down between 
the slopes of the valley just beyond the old brick 
school-house of my boyish recollection has won me 
many a word of biting censure from the female 
pedagogues of those days, and not unfrequently 
have my bare laggard legs been made to tingle 
wannly by an energetic application of apple-tree 
sprout and birchen switch. I remember how we 
boys and girls would put the yellow petals of the 
tall, slender buttercup under our chins in turn 
to see if we " loved butter, ' ' and our blowing the 
gray tops of the burned-out dandelion blossoms 
to see if "mother wanted us at home." The 
girls, with their bright, clear complexions, were 
every one dear lovers of butter by this childish 
test. What bright reflections from these brilliantly 
colored wild-flowers bloomed out on the delicately 
rounded contour of girlish mouth and chin, and 
what rippling music of girlish laughter filled them 



1 66 AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

with deepening dimples that won our boyish 
hearts as we thought without recall. What per- 
fume of clover, blushing red with Nature's passion, 
what snowy levels of wide-eyed daisies were the 
boon companions of golden-hearted childhood. 
Was ever anything more beautiful to our childish 
eyes than the royal hue of the Blue Flag, — the 
Iris of the meadows ? and what bunches of delicate 
purple color of the " Flower-de-I^uce " towered 
above the sedgy grasses of our playground ! I^ong- 
fellow sings of the Iris : — 

"Thou art the Iris, from celestial portals 
Sent with thy golden rods 
To bring some gift or message unto mortals 
From the immortal gods. 

"Thou art the Muse, that hath her habitation 
Beside the silent streams. 
Peopling with phantoms of imagination 
The border-land of dreams." 

And what dreams are like those of far-away child- 
hood? I never see the Iris but I hear the light- 
some, buoyant melody that in those days went 
flying over the alder- tops, where Robin Redbreast 
spent the whole day whistling to the summer 
wind, and where Robert-of-Iyincoln scattered his 
notes broadcast on the breeze, each one like the 
sparkling raindrops of a summer shower, and with 
a most reckless disregard of the wishes of other 
songsters to be heard at this outdoor concert. 



AMONG THE HILI.S. 1 67 

Sparrow, catbird, thrush, and numerous woodland 
vagabonds who sang to us without stint, sing 
for me now as then. In those days I never tired 
of watching the orioles and red-crested wood- 
peckers cleaving the air like bits of bright crim- 
son flame ; and how intensely blue were the skies 
reaching ever downward to the hills that hemmed 
in the broad acres of fragrant bloom of nodding 
clover, with bronzed dragon-fly and burly bumble- 
bee to keep them company, with hosts of flying 
shadows to hide them from the hot sun ! Halcyon 
days indeed ! when our hardest task was to sit 
in the uncomfortable desks where our fathers and 
mothers had sat before us, and with a no less 
irksome experience than our own ! So much of 
reminiscence have these two urchins given me, and 
who seemed to me but a second edition of my 
own childhood. I have been really a bo}^ for a 
moment, and how freshly everything comes back 
to me ! I wonder of what my fellow-travellers 
are thinking. I have thought that thinking must 
be akin to electricity, it is so swift winged. 

What a strange sprite is Thought ! What an 
unrul}^ sort of a fellow, full of aimless wanderings, 
and 3'et a very Hercules when his shoulder is at 
the wheel. Every snort and puff" of the locomo- 
tive, which is taking me nearer the blue hills of 
boyhood, shouts the triumph of Thought over 
Matter. The telegraph-poles which fly so swiftly 



1 68 AMONG THE HILLS. 

past me are every one witnesses to the power of 
Thought over Time and to the subjection of Space. 
How wonderful this quahty of the human brain, 
which has lashed the Demon of the Lightning to 
the lamp-post, which has given it the tongue and 
speech of man, and which has taught it the art of 
writing its messages. Thought will find for you 
the innermost secrets of Nature, once aroused to 
its task. Thought is the Alchemist, the Merlin of 
Mankind, the fuel of the World's enlightenment, 
as Force is the expression of Natural Law. 

But the rain is over, or rather we have emerged 
from it some time since, and there are ruddj^ streaks 
of sk}^ above the White Hills in the west. The old 
homestead looks down the highway at me with 
warm, flashing panes, — the old-time greeting at 
sunset ! but I shall slumber under the silent shad- 
ows of New England's mountain monarch with 
to-morrow's falling dusk. To-night as the sun 
goes down I watch the slow shifting lights of the 
landscape from my hammock under the elms of 
childhood. The moon is rising over Quito Moun- 
tain ; the lonely cry of the loon comes up from the 
pond back of the hill, and the air is filled with 
drowsy sounds. The stairs to the attic under the 
roof answer to my tread with their old sympathetic 
creak as I feel my way in the dark, as I used to do 
years ago ; and amid the perfume of sweet-scented 
herbs I am e?i rotite to the land of dreams ! 




I. 

ON THE PEABODY RIVER. 

HAVE found, like the charm of a rare 
day in June, slowly fading away with the 
brilHant setting of the sun, with its beau- 
tiful landscape softened and subdued in the slow- 
rising mists of fragrant meadows and leafy lowlands, 
the lively reminiscences and treasured memories 
of a summer vacation among the real pleasures of 
its more active enjoyments. The snapping fore- 
stick of my open fire in the early autumn re- 
calls happily its larger prototype which blazed so 
cheerily upon the broad hearth-stones of a famous 
hostelry in the heart of the White Mountains, as 
I returned at night hungry and tired, yet strangely 
exhilarated, from some one of the many trout- 
streams in its vicinity. Each recollection is sur- 
rounded with a halo of its own. My fire snaps 
lively-like, and with the swift flame that mounts 
the narrow flue each takes on the charm of real- 
ism ; in the hiss and sputter of the burning wood 
I hear the murmur of pleasant voices, while the 
thin wreaths of smoke grow into familiar shapes, 

169 



170 AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

and the dream becomes more real as I stray in 
pleasant reverie among the shadows of the White 
Hills. Certainly no more charming place can be 
found for a brief stay in this wilderness of Nature 
than the Glen, for I am sure they who look out 
through its clear morning air upon the sharply 
cut lines of its mountain summits, massed solidly 
against the blue background of the sky, the grace- 
ful yet imposing proportions of Madison and its 
brotherhood of like noble lineage, can leave them 
with no other than the sincerest desire to return 
for a space with each recurring season. Utter 
quiet and repose, wonderful feasts of color, charm 
and grandeur of mountain scenery, tempt the lover 
of Nature pure and simple with a power hardly 
to be withstood ; and here, too, are outdoor sports 
in abundant variety. No point in the mountains 
affords more promise to the summer idler, who, 
like a bee flitting from flower to flower, finds here 
at last the sweets that reward his wandering search. 
So it seemed to myself upon my second coming 
hither, as my expectant eye caught the first 
glimpse of the home-lights of the Glen through 
the falling dusk of a late August day, as our 
driver made the rise beyond Nineteen-mile Brook. 
The crimson flush had long faded from the stony 
profile which marks the grim visage of the Imp. 
The slow climbing of the hills had grown tedious, 
and the sibilant song of the brakes monotonous, 



AMONG THE HILLS. 171 

as we rattled down the steep sides of the valleys, 
arousing the answering echoes far and wide ; the 
jolting over the loose planks of the rude bridges 
thrown across the highway at frequent intervals 
and its rough places had become more wearisome ; 
so, when cramped and stiff from long-enforced posi- 
tion I had dismounted at mine host Milliken's door, 
it was with such appreciation of coming rest and 
good cheer in the cheery welcome of a blazing fire 
of huge logs, with their crackling promise of 
abundant creature comforts, as to make me forget 
all the discomforts of my ride. 

Giving my luggage and sporting outfit to John, 
a whole-hearted and genial son of Erin, I was 
shown to my room, which faced squarely upon the 
Presidential range, beautiful even at night. This 
gave me an added pleasure. The black woods 
swept like a sombre drapery down from the sum- 
mits of the mountains ; the night-mists blew in 
ghostly shapes down the valley, adding to the 
weird effect of the deep night-shadows, and about 
each lofty peak the bright stars hung in glittering 
crowns, with the slender sickle of the new moon 
above them all. Dark, soundless, and lonely, their 
depths lay spread out for miles and miles ; sound- 
less but for the eternal speech of the streams 
which gush from their hearts outward into the 
broad intervales of the Androscoggin. How one 
can look upon such a vision of the greatness of 



172 AMONG THE HILLS. 

Nature, and not feel subdued and silenced, I could 
never imagine ; for if ever the sense of one's little- 
ness is forced upon him, it must be when he 
stands within the shadow and majesty of the 
Hills. 

Here, in the Wambek Methna of the North, the 
White Hills of New England, one finds Nature 
in her grandest and most imposing arra5^ Her 
leaping streams tumbling down the broad valleys, 
and surging over their precipitous highways choked 
with massive boulders, falling 

"From morn to noon, — 
From noon to eve, a summer's day," 

into such depths as Milton saw with mental vision, 
black as Erebus and peopled with gloomy shadows 
and damp, misty shapes, careering through wild 
ravines, or trickling down from mountain-top to 
lowest base over the stained ledges in gleaming 
lines of molten silver, are the personification of 
Abandon. Her ragged crags and precipices, shorn 
of all their covering of verdure, stripped to the 
bare rock by the elements, gray, barren, and for- 
saken, tell the story of the Desolation of the 
Storm. Power, the power which is supreme in 
Nature, and which awes to silence, is written 
upon every lineament of these mountain-faces. 
The Invisible is here revealed by the majesty 
and magnificence of his handiwork. His hand is 



AMONG THE HILLS. 173 

reached out to us, and we are led dumb-like 
through the grandest cloisters of his temples. 
But to-night the great organ is silent. The wind 
has dropped to sleep, and so have the mountain 
worshippers. The only sound that comes to me 
through my half-raised window is the low-pitched 
tone, the drowsy murmur of the Peabody, but a 
few steps away. 

Much as I enjo5^ed the picturesque beauty of the 
scene, the inner man demanded the appeasing of 
a robust appetite, and which done, I planned my 
outing for the following day. I had determined 
to make a trouting trip down the Peabody River. 
Calling John, I crossed his calloused palm with a 
bit of silver, and the answering smile left no room 
to doubt but that my wants would be duteously 
attended to. He knew where the fattest angle- 
worm familj' lived, and would pay them an early 
morning call in my behalf. 

Seated before the huge open fire, how its ruddy 
light flashed outward across the broad hall and 
along the walls of the hostelry ! The soot burned 
in lurid lines of battle across the dingy chimney- 
back, as in childhood da3^s I had seen it do at 
the old homestead, and the tourists, scattered in 
groups here and there in the firelight, seemed more 
like the components of some great family reunion 
than the acquaintance of a single daj'. How 
brightly the fire blazed upon the broad hearth ! 



174 AMONG THE HILLS. 

Its crackle, mingling with the drowsy hum of voices 
but indistinctly heard, was but a prelude to the 
sweet, restful slumber which came with the later 
nightfall. 

A few rods below the hostelry, the beautiful Pea- 
body River flows over a bed of sienna-colored peb- 
bles with many a gleam and ripple as the sun lights 
up the countless facets that gather and break along 
its surface, each of the brilliance of a diamond. 
Its rise is three miles away in Huntington Ravine, 
close under the towering dome of Mount Wash- 
ington, — a stream that was born in a single night, 
in the throes of a terrible autumn storm, if the 
legend is to be believed. Having taken an early 
breakfast, and with feet stoutly clad, my gossamer 
coat securely lashed to my creel-strap, with slender 
rod in hand, and with heart as light as that of a 
boy of fifteen, I started upward and southward on 
the road to Jackson. A rubber coat is very con- 
venient as one threads these mountain defiles, for 
the showers come down the mountain-passes with- 
out warning ; and one thing is certain, whenever 
it rains here, the wet drops pour straight down as 
if the bottom had dropped from every cloud. The 
evening before was fine and clear, but the mountain- 
peaks on this particular morning were obscured 
by broken masses of cloud, which blew apart for 
an hour only to close up darker and thicker than 
before. The mountain-peaks were indulging in a 



AMONG THE HIIvI^S. 1 75 

veritable fit of sulks, as royal people frequently do. 
Less than a quarter of a mile away the width of 
the valley is compressed into the narrowness of a 
ravine, the entrance to which leads up and along 
the outer ramparts of Pinkhain Notch, and down 
through which the Peabody pours like a mad tor- 
rent. The highway snail-like toils up, up, always 
up, along the slopes of the Wildcat to the divide 
of the Pinkham Notch, where the music of the 
Peabody is supplemented by that of the wilder and 
more romantic KHis. The way hither is full of 
quiet charm and enjoyment ; for once within the 
margin of the woods, the traveller along this 
stretch of mountain-road, winding its way through 
an unkempt wilderness, hemmed in by the deep, 
cool shadows of a luxuriant woodland growth, may 
revel in the perfume and fascination of the prime- 
val woods. Here are masses of golden-rod bloom, 
and dainty sprays of the pale frost-flower, shoulder 
high. Intermingled with them are clusters of the 
scarlet berry of the bitter alder, that shines like 
pellets of wax. The snowy foam of the river, 
bovvding along with a boisterous, rollicking song, 
is brilliant in its whiteness, and the splash, dash, 
and spatter of this woodland romp, filling the ear 
with its medley of sounds, the picture of Nature's 
painting, hedging one about like a huge cyclorama, 
and the bracing atmosphere, are all so exhilarating 
that every nerve ■ tingles with suppressed excite- 



176 AMONG THE HILLS. 

ment. Is it any wonder that all the buoyancy in 
one's nature should come with a single bound to 
the surface ? I did not attempt to repress those 
livelier sensations which since bo5diood seemed, to 
have lain dormant. I hallooed with all the zest 
of a boy, and the echoes went flying up and down 
the ravine to lose themselves at last in the brawl 
of the leaping water below me. 

A half-hour's climb ends at the well-worn path 
that follows the steep descent to the edge of 
Emerald Pool, made famous by its portrait by 
Beirstadt. To strike in here, but little more than 
a mile from the Glen House, and from thence 
follow the wayward stream down, is the proper 
thing, and there is no need of haste. At first 
glance at the liquid emerald below, one's incli- 
nation is to sit down upon the rude plank seat 
upheld between two huge spruces grov/ing just 
above the Pool, so restful and so full of repose is 
this charming nook. It is a place above all 
others in which to dream and drowse. Strange 
fancies flit through the brain, and the world is 
forgotten. I am sitting at the feet of Nature, 
spellbound by the magic of her subtile influences. 
Above is the dark silhouette of the tree-tops 
against the sky, and below is a circular sheet of 
water, less than a hundred feet in diameter, un- 
surpassed in its natural beauty by any woodland 
pool I had ever seen, and so translucent as to 



AMONG THE HILLS. 177 

reflect the minutest object above it. It is an 
emerald cup brimful of liquid amber. At its 
head, massive buttresses of granite stretch almost 
across the stream, to stay the torrent of the Pea- 
body but a moment, that with tumultuous roar 
pushes through the narrow flume of these rocks 
out into the basin of deep, calm waters, leaving a 
track white as the snow of winter. A few feet 
below the commotion of the cascade, the boiling, 
seething current is soon lost in faint and ever- 
widening ripples, tinged with every shade of green 
from dark to light, — to almost the paleness of 
sherry as they reach out toward the shallows at 
its lower edge, where they again escape in wild, 
broken leaps over its mountain roadway, paved 
with immense boulders, into the valley. An old, 
gnarled wide-limbed canoe-birch, dirty-white, spot- 
ted with blotches of sienna and umber, leans far 
out over the Pool, every limb and tiny twig of 
which is reproduced in reverse upon or within its 
polished surface, while around its ragged margin 
the tall shapely spruces keep stately watch over 
this jewel of the mountain, most beautiful when 
the sun pours down its strong vertical light, when 
the waters become transparent like crystal, and 
that are like a huge palette strown with rare 
colors of sky and wood. The rude setting of 
parti-colored rocks adds to the picturesque beauty 
of the stream, and as I prepare for my first throw 



1/8 AMONG THE HILIvS. 

it would not be surprising to see a troop of Naiads 
rise impetuously to protest against my design. 
Hardly has the hook struck the water than a sil- 
very gleam lights up the monotony of its placid 
surface, and a thrill as subtile as the shock of a 
galvanic battery shoots along the line to the tips 
of my fingers, and in a single moment his trout- 
ship has described a parabola through the air, 
and is safely landed in my basket. There is more 
virtue in the shock from a sharp trout-bite than 
from all the electrical appliances in existence ; 
and were I a physician I should prescribe trout- 
fishing in large doses to half my patients. My 
pocket might suffer, but I should have done my 
duty by my clientele. Anglers have tender hearts, 
as was that of dear old Izaac Walton ; but no 
music sounds sweeter in the ear of the true fisher- 
man than the spasmodic flop of the first trout 
against the side of his creel, especially if of good 
size. What a hornpipe he dances in the grass- 
lined basket ! It is the dance of death to him ; 
but to me it is a rare panacea for broken rest and 
over-worked body and brain. 

From the edge of the Pool downward to the 
valley the bed of the river widens, and the waters 
speed along with a devil-may-care recklessness, as 
if conscious of the long meadows below, where 
they must needs retard their turbulent movement. 
Over its sturdy barriers it leaps with a headlong 



AMONG THE HILLS. 1 79 

rush and roar, dashing broad sheets of spray, bright 
and ghstening, against the ochre-stained walls of 
its rough-set channel. 

The beauty of mountain scenery, especially 
along the Peabody, lies in its endless variety. A 
new point of view, and the outlines change, — 
a new picture greets the vision. So pushing down 
the gorge, every step opens up some fresh and 
charming vista of wild and rugged scenery, — 
some new wonderland of the stream, before or 
behind. But without the accompanying sport of 
angling for the spotted beauties that hide within 
the eddying currents, and of pulling them strug- 
gling from their hiding-places, such a jaunt would 
be fatiguing and even forbidding. What leaps 
one takes from rock to rock, and what splendid 
chances for an ice-cold bath ; but the eye measures 
the distance accurately, and, with only a disagree- 
able jar now and then, the expedition is made in 
safety. Only danger, or the strong impulse born 
of momentary excitement, would carry one across 
the rifts and chasms and rocky flumes in this 
highway of boisterous floods. An untimely slip 
would result in a bad fall, with possibly serious 
consequences. In these mountain jaunts the bet- 
ter way is to take a congenial disciple of the rod 
along with you. It is safest so to do. 

The prevailing tones of the foliage are dark, but 
now and then a scarlet maple flames out a bit of 



l80 AMONG THE PULLS. 

premature color, brilliant and striking enough as 
it is pleasing ; a wandering bee darts down the 
opening in the wood, a gleam of burning gold ; a 
solitary eagle casts a slow-moving shadow athwart 
the rocks ; but I miss the birds of the lowlands, 
though there is good shooting here in the early 
fall months. 

Along this by-way of Nature the combination of 
tree, rock, and stream is picturesque and animat- 
ing. There is none of the overpowering depres- 
sion incident to the dark, threatening chasms and 
mist-laden shddows of Nineteen-mile Brook, Soft 
mosses and trailing vines fringe the sloping banks 
of the lowlands as I enter them, where a succes- 
sion of quiet pools offer resting-places for the Spirit 
of the Waters, and each pays its tribute to the 
angler's skill. Looking back through the vista of 
stately trees, the rocky pathway behind seems 
like a rudely sculptured staircase, leading as it 
were into the vast cathedral of the mountain, 
with countless nave and transept adorned with 
arabesques of graceful foliage along its sides, and 
overarching all, the blue vault of the heaven. 
From the lichens and damp mosses, the gray, 
shaggy trunks of the wood, their matted carpetings 
of luxuriant vines, I emerge into the meadow, 
with its levels of swaying grasses and ample sun- 
light. The spell of forest cloister is broken, and 
with an involuntary shiver the chill of the moun- 



AMONG THE HllvIyS. l8l 

tain woods is shaken oif, and the day is begun 
anew. Swaths of new-mown grass reach down 
to the brink of the river, and throw off a dehcious 
perfume, and through the narrow margin of the 
dwarf alders that mark the swales with their green 
hedges I get glimpses of the red blouse of the 
haymaker, — bits of warm, strong color in the dun- 
hued landscape. Just over the knoll to the right 
the smokes of the new hostelr)' curl lazily upward 
in the still air, and below the toll-bridge, the wicket 
through which the tourist passes to the summit 
of the White Hills, the stream grows wider, shal- 
lower, and less impulsive, indulging in many a 
tender dalliance with the brown pebbles strown so 
thickly over the river-bottom, its droning music 
dying away in soft murmurs as it reaches the deep, 
dark waters of the mill-pond, so silent under the 
shadows of the round-topped elms that line its 
edges, and that add so much of pastoral charm 
and beauty. 

Not a foot of the river, which seems already like 
an old friend, has escaped scrutiny, as many a 
greedy trout has found to his cost. The transition 
from the rough mountain-side to the more prosaic 
charm of the lowland farm is a swift one ; but 
here the stream, grown bores, its wild license 
of leaping cataract and deafening tumult is left 
behind. A farewell look at the opal current, its 
troops of pale asters, that dip and nod so gracefully 



102 AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

on its brink, its slender cardinal-flowers amid- 
streani, flaming up like torches, tingeing the sur- 
face with splashes of blood-red scarlet, and I have 
clambered up the bank, a tangled steep, just beyond 
which, in the gulley, is "Josh Billings's" spring, 
marked with white-painted slab nailed crossways 
to a stout stake. With a cooling draught from 
its crystal fountain I wend my way homeward, 
and the forenoon's sport is done. 



i 




II. 

NINETBEN-MILE BROOK. 

I^NK host had suggested a trip to Nineteen- 
mile Brook as one which would repay the 
hardships of the jaunt. Acting upon a 
few general directions, which proved to be very 
indefinite in character, morning found me with rod 
and basket shouldered, and well started upon a 
solitary, and as it proved a somewhat haphaz- 
ard journey. I began my trudge in high spirits, 
but my return was more wearisome. There are 
three ways of reaching this famous trout-stream : 
first by the way of the tortuous sluice, nearly 
two miles in length, by which the Glen House 
is supplied with the purest of water ; next, by 
the highway to its outlet, where it empties 
into the larger Peabod}^, and thence up ; and, 
lastl}^, b}" the more direct route of an old, and, in 
some places, entirely obliterated logging-road. I 
chose the latter; and making steep ascent of the 
lower outworks of Carter Mountain, keeping as 
nearly as possible the faint trail, described by John 
as the ' ' path sorr, ' ' I entered upon a corduroy- 

183 



1 84 AMONG THE HILLS. 

road that was quite plain for a short distance, 
when it disappeared entirely in a perfect wilder- 
ness of spruce-tops, strewn about in utter disregard 
of who might come after. It was a labyrinth wor- 
thy the invention of a Daedalus. Slipping, jump- 
ing, and creeping over and through the intricacies 
of acres of bristling tree-tops I at last emerged 
into the "open," completely puzzled as to the 
whereabouts of the logging-road. Here and there 
a quaint, weather-bleached stub pointed straight 
skyward ; the Sphinx could not have been more 
reticent than these silent memorials of the old 
spruce forest. Each seemed a counterpart of the 
other, and under an overcast sky, without compass 
or guide, whither to turn was an absorbing and 
perplexing question. 

Keeping close to the mountain-side, and push- 
ing through the dense growth of dwarf clierry and 
birch, breaking down a bush-top every few rods 
to mark the trail, if it should become needful to 
retrace my footsteps, — and which was a most wise 
precaution on my part, — I found at last the upper 
end of the sluice, and had soon reached the brook. 
It was a long, perilous journey, and more than 
once the disagreeable sense of uncertainty as to 
my whereabouts was uppermost in mind. Two 
hours of the morning had been exhausted in what 
was more than once seemingly a fruitless search, 
and it was with the greatest satisfaction that I at 



AMONG THE HII,LS. 1 85 

last found myself beside this famous trout-stream. 
In mj' haste to get to its leaping current I broke 
the tip to my rod, but fortunately near the ferrule. 
"Whittled to a point, and pushed hard into its 
socket, it served me through the day, and in fact 
during my stay among these New Hampshire hills. 
From this point I followed the stream well up into 
the Notch on this side, through the wildest gorge 
of the Carter range ; and, singular as it may 
seem, the nearer its headwaters the better I found 
the fishing ! Mountain trout are good climbers to 
reach this altitude of rocky steep and dangerous 
chasm. He is a hardy sportsman who has the 
pluck to explore Nineteen-mile Brook without a 
guide, and I would hardly advise a stranger to the 
topography of Carter Mountain to brook the peril 
of getting lost in the maze of undergrowth that 
makes the warp and woof of this rugged forest. 
At best the brook is a stream of barricades. Trees 
twisted and torn by the winds are thrown length- 
wise and across it, and with the huge rocks em- 
bedded amid stream, they form natural ramparts 
to prevent farther progress, as if some genii of 
the forest had forbidden a deeper penetration into 
the secret fastnesses beyond. The most absolute 
silence reigns. The woods rise above me like the 
giants of a huge amphitheatre, within whose arena 
the Titans of the muttering storms struggle for the 
mastery of domain ; and, stirred and shaken to 



1 86 AMONG THE HILLS. 

the heart's core by the thunder's deep reverbera- 
tions of applause, rising rank upon rank hke the 
old Roman sight-seers, they stand the incarna- 
tion of repose. 

How grand, how overpowering, the solitude of 
this mountain wilderness ! How vast these dim 
aisles, that reach out into deeper, darker growths 
of spruce and pine ! How human seem these 
silent yet ever-living apparitions of the Deity that 
crowd so closely around me ! Their silence would 
be oppressive were it not for the unbroken monod)^ 
of the cataract that threads the pathwaj^ of the 
winter snows, ever leaping downward into the val- 
ley in tumultuous abandon. Here is unkempt 
Nature in truth. I stand abashed before her wild 
magnificence of rugged beauty and untaught grace. 
What perfection of form, what wealth of grandeur 
and power is here of gnarled, arching root, of 
huge, black trunk, of wide-spread, branching arms, 
ever reaching upward to the clouds that sweep 
their tops ; what deep shadows enfold the pygmy 
at their feet. Here are rocks, high up along this 
mountain-side, which looked on at the building of 
the world ; and what grand secrets are locked within 
their hearts of stone ! What histories of countless 
races are inscribed within their granite archives ! 
Along these loft)^ hills are writ the hierogl)'phics 
of their building, the footprints of the Deity. 
What a place for communing with one's inner 



AMONG THE HILLS. 1 8/ 

self! How narrow grows the span of human 
living under these lofty giants of the woods, whose 
speech is of the centuries ! Art thou a Pharisee ? 
then come not here, lest thou be humbled as a 
child. Nature has no use for human pride or 
human folly. 

For some distance down, the course of the brook 
is through a deep, narrow fissure in the rocks. It 
might be well taken for the descent to Hades, so 
gloomy, dark, and damp grows the ravine. The 
trees shut closely in overhead, making an arcade 
of limb and leaf so tightly interlaced as to effectu- 
ally bar out all sunshine, and below, the channel 
of the brook is held within lofty, perpendicular 
walls of sombre-colored granite, bare and smooth, 
as if faced with maul and chisel. The voices of 
the rushing waters seemed smothered and pent up. 
Strong currents of cold air strike the face, and 
deep shadows tinge the writhing foam with a 
grayish cast, while the narrow pools below the 
boiling torrent are as black as ebony. So steep 
is the descent down the mountain that the brook 
is visible but a short distance in advance. Burly 
and unyielding as seem these huge rocks, they 
have been strangely shattered and riven apart by 
the wild, unrestrained forces of Nature. How like 
human arteries are these silver streams. They 
are the life-currents of Nature feeding the thirsty 
valleys, to be again drunk up by the sun and car- 



1 88 AMONG THE HILLS. 

ried back into the heart of the mountains, where 
they received their birth, and thence to go outward 
over the same pathway of rock to renew their 
beneficent work. 

I have read with interest Mr. Drake's realistic 
description of his visit to Carter Notch ; but instead 
of taking dinner in the "old cabin," my guide, 
the same honest ' ' Jock ' ' Davis, built a fire of dry 
twigs on the terraced rocks by the side of the 
Wildcat. A cobble of stones was very quickly, 
deftly arranged, and a battered stew-pan of an- 
cient pattern, shining with much wear, was put 
atop of all. Two dozen trout were "dressed," 
and with salt, pepper, and golden corn-meal, and a 
generous slice of pork, they were soon browned to 
a nicety. We had ha,rd bread in abundance, and 
a delicious dinner was enjoyed, accompanied by 
not less delicious draughts of ice-cold water from 
the river, which ran pure as crystal over the rocks, 
scoured clean by centuries of attrition. Every 
part of the process of the making of this mountain 
repast, simple but rare, was tinged with the ro- 
mance of the backwoods, and we ate with appetites 
whetted to a peculiar keenness by our mountain 
sport. That was a memorable visit to the Carter 
Notch, bringing home as we did over two hundred 
good-sized trout. 

The physical features of Nineteen-mile Brook and 
the Wildcat are very similar. Both are boisterous, 



AMONG THE HILLS. 1 89 

swift-running waterways which pour out into the 
intervales of the Androscoggin and of the beautiful 
Conway, through scener}^ of remarkable grandeur, 
and 5'^et distinctively different from either that of 
the larger Peabody or its western tributary, the 
West Branch on the opposite side of the Glen. 
Midday found me at the head of the sluice on my 
return down stream. Trout were abundant but 
small. From the ledges below, the Peabody Valley 
is in plain sight, but for the intercepting tops of 
the forest-trees ; for it is still a long and steep 
descent to the river. On the right for a distance 
down is an airy trestle-work of fast decaying up- 
right timbers, planted amid the boulders of the 
brook with cross-beams stretching inward to the 
bank, the margin of which overhangs the whirling 
waters forty feet below. Along these timbers lay 
heavy spruce stringers, notched and pinned at 
intervals, and atop of this seemingly frail founda- 
tion are laid the short logs that make the corduroy 
road. It is a specimen of fertile backwoods' in- 
genuity ; for, as I am told, immense quantities of 
timber have found their way in 3'ears past over 
this rude logging-trail to the mills below. There 
is a sense of companionship about this dilapidated 
bit of road-building which comes with the manifest 
human endeavor to which it bears witness. Acres 
and acres of the mountain-side have been denuded 
of their stately spruce and pine, now overgrown 



190 AMONG THE HILLS. 

with the broad-leaved moosewood, with birch, 
cherry, and sparsely scattered maple, and amid all 
this waste, dead tree-tops bristle in every direction, 
making the undergrowth an almost impenetrable 
jungle. Gazing from some vantage-point at these 
vast mountain-ridges, fascinated with the wonderful 
smoothness of verdure, which like a green garment 
clothes their rugged slopes, one fails by lack of 
more intimate acquaintance to conceive the tangle 
of thicket and slippery, moss-grown boulder that 
tasks the stoutest brawn, and at every upward turn 
combats the energy of the explorer. The faint 
sound of invisible torrents afford the uninitiate no 
suggestion of the wild panorama of forest-nook 
and mad caprice of whirling waters which hide 
behind these draperies of foliage. Behind the 
swaying tree-tops are inaccessible precipices, heaps 
of scattered boulders and fallen trees, the work of 
ages. Storm and frost, the fires of earth and 
of heaven, are accomplishing a constant work of 
demolition. Here Nature adds and subtracts her 
factors to and from each other, solving the prob- 
lems of the centuries in silent disregard of human 
interference. Here are tall spruces roughly scarred 
by winter and summer storm, with pendent glob- 
ules of rare amber-colored gum, and which have 
been daintily distilled by the summer heats out 
of rich, flowing saps, and which hang just out of 
reach above me. Its gathering is quite a business. 



AMONG THE HILLS. IQI 

and is quite profitable to trapper and guide here- 
abouts. The lumbermen bring large quantities of 
this fruit of the spruce as they come down from 
the timber-slopes, and which readily finds a market 
at the druggist's, from whose plate-glass windows 
it looks out, not upon the pageantry of merrie 
June or the dreamy quiet of an Indian summer 
among the hills, but rather upon the pride and 
squalor of the town, and from whose sweet-scented 
cases, with all their aristocratic surroundings, it is 
sold to shop-girls, dyspeptics, and school-children. 

O, the seductive charm of its aromatic quid in 
school-boy da3^s ! How many were the richly 
merited chastisements of leathern strap and birchen 
switch its clandestine yet delicious chewing brought 
upon our shoulders ! What rare visions of 3"0uth 
are stored within its transparent depths : of staunch, 
glittering crusts, of clumsy snow-shoes and boyish 
awkwardness ; of winter air and winter life, when 
the earth has begun its inclination toward the sun, 
bringing pleasant warmth and dripping eaves at 
high noon, and longer days ; of fragrant woods, 
when boyhood has gone into the lowland spruces, 
when the March winds sing weird, crooning luUa- 
bys amid their tops, and shake down upon one's 
shoulders huge flakes of snow which the last 
storm had lodged so thickly over their matted 
boughs, to search for amber jewels ! What memo- 
ries of irate pedagogue, of sunlight slanting down 



192 AMONG THE HILLS. 

the narrow aisle, of loudly accentuated footstep, of 
sharply questioning eye, of pinioned chin and far- 
protruding tongue ! Dead men tell no tales, and 
the bit of chewing-gum, secretly started on its way 
down the youthful gullet a moment before, is be- 
yond the reach of the baffled schoolmaster, who can 
scarce conceal his chagrin. What boyish pranks 
were carried on behind the sloping tops of the old 
pine desks of the low-roofed brick school-house 
the master might imagine, but never discover. The 
aroma of the spruce brings back the tide of youth 
again, with all its adventure of winter sport and 
blush of summer days in field and wood. 

Occasionally the deep baying of hounds comes 
up on the wind ; and what a wind it is, — cold, 
damp, and disagreeable. A stiff breeze is blowing 
from the base of the mountain upward through 
this natural pneumatic- tube, making the brawny 
limbs of the trees groan and screech as if in pain. 
The dark leaves, up-blown, take the hue of silver, 
and now and then a rotten branch comes sailing 
down with a stealthy plash into the water. There 
is a sound of heavy feet in the underbrush yonder, 
and with expectant look I scan the rocks above 
me to see if some grim Bruin is overlooking my 
adventure. It is only the pounding of the tumult- 
uous waters, or the fancy of an over-alert imagina- 
tion. Bears are not uncommon here ; in fact, some 
years they are seen too often for the tourist's 



AMONG THE HILLS. 193 

peace of mind. But how the wind blows ! I can 
hardly make the cast down-stream. The clouds 
shut closely in overhead ; the breeze dies away ; 
the air grows dark and murky, and the trees seem 
shorter and their tops nearer the ground, and one 
by one the huge round drops of rain give warning 
of the coming squall. There is just time to get 
on m}^ rubber coat, and the rain falls heavily, lash- 
ing the brook into foam. How the trout take the 
bait ! but as suddenly as it came the shower is over, 
and the bright sun lights up the dim vista of this 
rugged waterway once more. As its waters glint 
and glisten it is difficult to imagine the roaring 
torrent, which, on an autumn night of years ago, 
rushed down over these steeps, making the solid 
earth tremble under the shock of their terrible 
assault ; but there is hardly a mountain stream 
which has not allied to it some tale of tragic inter- 
est, and the Nineteen-mile Brook is not an excep- 
tion. The land-slip of Carter Mountain, which 
occurred on an autumn day of long ago, will be 
long remembered. Two whole days the clouds 
had hidden the tops of the neighboring mountains, 
gathering from far and near for the assault. On 
a Sunday night the storm set in. All night and 
during the next day it raged among the mountains, 
beating with relentless fury against the side of the 
Dome ; the wind blew a hurricane ; the rain fell in 
torrents, flooding the valleys and filling the hearts 



194 AMONG THE HILLS. 

of their dwellers with terror. The trees and rocks, 
loosened in the storm, came tumbling down the 
steep sides of the mountain into the gorge of this 
brook. Its narrow defile choked with water, and 
the debris of an enormous landslide swept with 
resistless power down the bed of this stream into 
the Peabody, carrying everything before it. The 
Androscoggin rose six feet in a single night. 
The lowland farmers had not witnessed such a 
storm for a generation. Millions of logs and 
a score of saw-mills were swept away, and many 
lives were destroyed. Never since has such a wild 
storm fallen upon this region. Hardly a bridge 
was left upon its foundations ; and at this day the 
gruff denizen of these mountain fastnesses alludes 
to the event as the "Great storm of '69." 

But here I am at the stage-road. It is a good 
ten-mile journey I have taken, and I have an 
impression, from my aching shoulders, that my 
creel has grown heavy ; and winding in my line, 
I am en roide for home. The sun is disappearing 
behind the mountain-ridges and the bronzed peak 
of Mount Washington looms up grandly into the 
clear atmosphere, the impersonation of Repose, 
solemn, stately, and still. I climb a sharp rise 
in the hilly highway, and just beyond, in the 
cool, gray shadows of the early twilight, I catch 
glimpses of the curling smokes of the hotel and of 
moving figures down the highway. I hear voices, 



AMONG THE HILLS. I95 

and what an indescribable charm they suggest of 
home, with its wann, glowing hearth and compan- 
ionship, after the lonesome experiences of the day. 
But I have brought the romance of the stream 
with me, even into the prosaic and commonplace 
highway; and even though I am plodding along 
the worn ruts of a road-building humanity, my 
thoughts are not altogether with them. My ears 
still ring with the clamor of the impetuous waters ; 
visions of leafy arches and sculptured groins, of 
shaggy columns and of huge granite fonts, echoing 
strange sounds, as if an untaught hand had swept 
across the keys of some great organ concealed in 
the shadowy cloisters of their wildernesses, crowded 
swift about me. Like a .photographer's plate, the 
retina had unconsciously stored away a multitude 
of negatives through the daj^, and the process of 
their developing began only when I had turned 
my back upon this rich feast of Nature. So the 
day ended, and no slumber was ever more peace- 
ful or rest more invigorating than that which 
came with the slow-falling night. 



III. 

ON THE WEST BRANCH. 




BACHING the house on my return from 
Nineteen -mile Brook, a curious -minded 
group gathered about my basket to inspect 



the trout, as fresh and glossy as when pulled from 
their hiding-places in that rollicking mountain 
stream. The trout is the most beautiful of all the 
finny tribe, and the sport of angling for them is 
most fascinating and exciting. The delay in my 
return and the lateness of the hour had occasioned 
some considerable alarm among the guests, though 
the landlord assured them that the wanderer would 
come with the nightfall. So he did, but how 
nearly my experience came to foolhardiness none 
knew so well as myself ; for the prospect of a 
night on the mountain is not productive of pleas- 
urable anticipation. 

The Glen was always the favorite fishing-ground 
of the veteran angler, "Josh Billings," and in 
years past, many were the excursions made to 
the neighboring brooks by this prince of the rod, 
coming home in the early dusk with basket filled 
196 



AMONG THE HIIvIvS. I97 

to overflowing, and a good-sized "string" beside. 
His favorite stream was the West Branch, one 
of the most charming of the mountain waterways, 
and entirely different from any of its crystal cous- 
ins in its physical characteristics. The Presiden- 
tial range presents a marked curve, forming the 
segment of a circle, with a broad valley between ; 
and, standing on the northern shoulder of Mount 
Washington, this brook is seen far below in the 
tree-tops a tiny thread of silver. If the ascent is 
made to the Summit by the carriage-road, after 
passing the Half-way House, a sharp turn to the 
left brings one to the rock-strewn plateau of 
the L,edge, which, treeless and bare of verdure, 
unless there may be a few scattered tufts of dull- 
gray feathery- topped grass to relieve its poverty 
of vegetation, juts out over a frightful precipice, 
that drops down, down, hundreds of feet into 
sheer nothingness, to where the giants of the 
forest have only the likeness of dwarf shrubs. To 
look down into the gulf below is terrifying to a 
person of weak nerves. The view from this point 
is one of uplifting grandeur and beauty. Down 
the valley are spread out the intervales of Gorham, 
the villages of Milan and Berlin, with their curling 
smokes of mills and factories, the Peabody River 
and its tributaries, and the ever-narrowing pass 
of the Glen ; and be3'ond all, a chain of lakes 
and rivers that look like burnished silver in the 



198 AMONG THE HIIvLS. 

bright morning sunshine. Opposite are the sym- 
metrical peaks of Madison, Adams, and Jefferson, — 
a mighty sweep of wind-blown crags skirted b)^ 
dark-green forests. A careless movement or a 
misstep would plunge one down headlong into the 
empty void below ; but to see is to appreciate, 
and such magnificence of scener>^ can only be 
appreciated by a visual experience, for no words 
can paint the picture here spread out before the 
wondering and awe-struck visitor. Turning your 
back on the headwaters of the West Branch, 
Pinkham's Notch, Tuckerman's and Huntington's 
Ravines, the Glen Ellis, Conway Intervales, and, 
farther away, the "golden horn" of Chocorua, 
are all in view. Silence is golden as one stands 
in the Presence which Mr. Drake so willingly ac- 
knowledges. It is in the basin at the foot of the 
I^edge that the West Branch takes its rise, and 
from the Half-waj^ House down to the stream, less 
than a mile over the sheltered boulders, runs the 
invisible pathway over which the "inimitable Josh" 
so frequently went in bygone days to his fishing. 
There is nothing so stimulating to one's propen- 
sit}' for trout-fishing as a peep into the gra.ss-lined, 
well-filled creel of a neighbor : so thought the 
Doctor, and so I have often thought myself when 
surveying these treasures of the meadow-streams, 
when won by some other skill than my own ; and 
when my friend had sufiiciently admired my trout, 



AMONG THE HILLS. 199 

his proposition to visit the famous West Branch 
with the coming morrow was greeted with a 
hearty response. We chose to reach it by the 
way of Osgood's Spring, over a footpath through 
the woods the margin of which lay just beyond the 
low-browed farmhouse across the Peabody from the 
Glen House. Before sunrise on the following day 
we were on our way, with our breakfast stowed 
away in our creels, to be partaken of when we 
had reached the stream. The sky was clear ; not 
a cloud-sail was in sight, and the air was cool and 
bracing and full of pure ozone. The fields were 
wet with dew, and across them ran the long 
swaths of grass mown the day before, and as yet 
unraked ; and over all lay low down, a thin, di- 
aphanous veil of mist, to make one think of the 
fairies and their white dancing-floors. Once across 
the shallow Peabody it was but a short distance 
to the half overgrown rail-fence, along by the side 
of which ran the cowpath to the woods, and into 
which we had soon plunged. Here was utter 
silence, with nothing to disturb it except the 
mufiaed snapping of the dew-moistened twigs 
under our stout boots. 

Among the most pleasurable of outdoor experi- 
ences are those gleaned within the deep shadows 
of the primeval woods, and along the rough-set 
pathways of some wild, mountainous region like 
the White Hills of New Hampshire. It is in the 



200 AMONG THE HILLS. 

heart of Nature, out of the way of noisy humanity, 
that one finds the most perfect peace ; and then 
what depths of quiet, what inimitable skill of 
building and of architecture, what grandeur of de- 
sign and richness of coloring, what glorious frescoes 
of blue of sky and white, swift-flying cloud are 
here ; and yet, what hidden mysteries of life lurk 
beneath these fallen leaves and within the rough 
rinds of these tall, shapely trees ! But we have 
soon reached the spring, and with a strip of birch- 
bark for a quaffing-cup we have quenched our 
thirst ; and on we push, stopping only a moment 
here and there to admire the brilliant scarlet of 
some maple, the magnificent leaf of the beautiful 
moosewood, or an exceptionally fine display of 
toad-stools ; but here are armies of creeping things, 
of insect-life which richly reward a moment's delay, 
and afford much pleasure and wonderment at the 
extent and fertility of Nature. 

The leaves which strew the ground so thickly, 
and keep the roots of the trees so well supplied 
with moist, rich mould, are pregnant with hidden 
dwellers. Scrape away the light covering of leaf 
and twig that hides the earth beneath your foot, 
and here are a pair of tiny snail-shells, as deli- 
cately colored as the clouds at sunrise ; an earwig 
wriggles rapidly into his burrow ; a huge beetle 
keeps him company. Right here in our pathway 
is the symmetrically rounded dome of the big 



AMONG THE HIIyLS. 201 

black wood-ant, the Formica rufa. These ants are 
found in the hollows of the trees oftentimes, and 
when the trees are cut for firewood in the winter- 
time, a hollow trunk contains not infrequently- 
large quantities of them, torpid with cold and 
frost ; and I have seen the choppers eat them by 
the handful ! They have a clean acidulous flavor, 
not unpleasant to the taste, and they were con- 
sidered by the Indians a great delicacy. The 
bear adds them to his scanty menu whenever he 
can. But these ants are to be avoided in warmer 
weather, as they have a way of making their 
company decidedly disagreeable, especially when 
they get into one's clothing or upon one's face or 
hands. Their sting is a severe one, though not 
so poisonous as that of some other of the ant 
species. Like the hornets they are the scavengers 
of the woods, quick to scent the carrion-feast, and 
quick to communicate the good luck to their 
friends ; and about which they accumulate in 
myriad numbers, and from whose devouring appe- 
tites nothing but the cleanly picked bones remain. 
They are carpenters, cutting and sawing the leaves 
and twigs into tiny bits, out of which they build 
their homes. An ant-hill is a curious and inter- 
esting study. The roof of their domicile, strown 
with a whitish covering of gravel, is as perfectly 
rounded as that of the dome of an Eastern mosque, 
— a city, in truth, peopled with thousands of ant 



202 AMONG THE HILLS. 

citizens. None of Nature's insect-dwellers are 
more active or more sagacious than these toilers 
who make their homes in the ground or in the 
decayed trunks of trees. Clannish to the last 
degree, and imitative of human-kind in many re- 
spects, they seem to have a large contingent of 
laborers, and as well standing armies. A single 
picket is usually in sight, and no more alert guards- 
man or more pugnacious insect can be imagined. 
Any invasion of their domain is quicklj^ discovered, 
and as quickly reported, when there is sent out a 
reconnoitring party ; and these are swiftly followed 
by the fighting men. The battle is often a fast 
and furious one, unless the intruders consult dis- 
cretion and retire ; but often the foraging-party is 
victorious, when they take possession, slaughter- 
ing all their prisoners without distinction of sex. 
Only the larvae are left undisturbed, and not un- 
frequently they are carried away by the victors, 
to be brought up in their own families. 

The smaller species of the ant family are not less 
pugnacious, though some will not fight at all, 
rolling themselves up into a ball and feigning 
death. One cannot observe them closely without 
granting them to be very intelligent insects. 

I have many a time seen the wood-ant marching 
in countless numbers over the leaves in long black 
lines and solid ranks, reminding me of a great 
army on a march. They seem to be divided into 



AMONG THE HII^IvS. 203 

castes, into an aristocracy, into militia, and into 
hewers of wood and drawers of water. Some of 
the ant family are not averse to slaveholding, and 
Darwin makes a very interesting mention of this, 
to him, unnatural instinct. It is a charming occu- 
pation to watch this tiny insect at his work ! Any 
injury to his house is quickly and industriously 
repaired, and I have seen them push a bit of stone 
or gravel larger than a pea a considerable distance, 
tipping it over and over with infinite patience and 
perseverance. In their work thej^ use their anten- 
nae with a marvellous ingenuitj^, pushing, pulling, 
and rolling whatever they wish a long distance. I 
have seen them, like a body of firemen at a rope, 
dragging, carr3dng a twig of the length of five or 
six inches, and of the diameter of a wheat-straw, 
some distance to the domicile, and without much 
difiicult}^ Their fighting-men are as handsome as 
the king's grenadiers, and are doubtless of a 
military race, chosen because of their dusky beauty 
and shapely strength. I have witnessed many of 
their battles, and dead or alive the captive is car- 
ried within the walls of their fortress, where I 
have often thought there might be a court of prize 
and confiscation. 

So threading our way through the forest aisles, 
here and there breaking the gossamer barrier of 
some spider's weaving, now scaling huge boulders 
carpeted with the blackest of black mosses, as soft 



204 AMONG THE HILLS. 

as the pile of fine velvet, now stooping low down 
to avoid the bristling lances of the scrub-spruces, 
that hem the narrow trail so closely in, till the 
brawl of the noisy river falls on the ear, a few 
moments later we stand above the broad rock- 
strewn channel of this now shrunken tributary 
of the Peabod5^ But we are to go a mile farther 
up stream before lunching. What grand scenery 
greets the vision at every bend and turn of the 
river, and what hosts of mountain-ash lean out 
over its pellucid waters ! The sun peers over the 
crest of the mountain to catch us at our break- 
fast, which passes off without incident, except 
that the Doctor thought the taste of this New 
Hampshire river was somewhat peculiar. Its am- 
ber color and fine bouquet were especially notice- 
able. The West Branch must have been a favor- 
ite with the Indian, if his love for strong waters 
were historically a fact. The Doctor hastened to 
make the first throw, but it was in vain. Twenty 
rods from the scene of our breakfast down stream, 
and not a sign of a trout has as yet rewarded our 
patience or skill. What mountain Deity had we 
offended ? The wind blew from the south, and 
by the almanac the signs were in the belly, and 
not a nibble as yet ! 

The Doctor suggested as an offering to the 
divine anger, that we ' ' spit on the bait ! ' ' which 
done the evil spell was broken, and the next throw 



AMONG THE HILLS. 20$ 

won for each a fine fish. From this out we had 
no cessation of sport. The river-bed is broad and 
unevenly paved with beautifully colored rocks of 
every hue of the rainbow, and between which rush 
the swift vari-colored waters. How they glint 
and glisten in the morning sunlight ! Here are 
amber shallows, black, sluggish pools, streaks of 
snow-white feathery foam, sienna-colored rapids, 
swirling currents, and hosts of cascades which 
seem to have caught all the deeper hues of the 
brilliant sky. On either side are the dark-green 
draperies of woods that reach up to the brown hazy 
summits of the stately hills with easy, graceful 
sweep. There are no shadow-haunted flumes or 
bottomless depths here as in the Nineteen-mile 
Brook ; no tumultuous roar of angry, rushing 
waters ; but instead, the light, airy trebles and 
sunny ripples of a laughing stream whose music 
is of the light-hearted, J03'0us kind which one 
hears in reveries and midsummer dreams among 
the singing-birds and among the orchard-trees. I 
can convey no idea of the infinite zest, the boyish 
exuberance, the glowing pleasure, of such an out- 
ing. The bright anticipation of its recurrence 
with each succeeding season relieves the irksome- 
ness of toil, the daily routine of drudgery, the 
close environment of city life which rounds up 
the lives of most men. lycaping from rock to rock 
we make our way over and across and ever down 



206 AMONG THE HILLS. 

stream to find ourselves at last beside the larger 
and deeper Peabody. What strength comes with 
the inbreathing of this pure mountain air, and 
what an exhilaration of sense these magnificent out- 
looks of river- nook and broken mountain outline 
bring to us at every step ; but here we wind in 
our lines, wash and count our trophies, and how 
beautiful they are ! How firm and shapely each 
curve, how bright their spots of scarlet, green, and 
gold, how transparent each crimson fin, and how 
they glistened and shone, wet and dripping with 
the ice-cold river water : only the glittering, far- 
off stars seem brighter and more wonderful. 

The highway is just above us, and gaining it 
we are on our way to the hotel, where we are the 
heroes of the hour. It was the best catch of the 
season ; but, had we not propitiated the demon of 
ill-luck as we did, our pleasure might have been 
greatly lessened. There is a wonderful sense of 
companionship in the babbling speech of these 
mountain streams, and in the silence of the night, 
far away from their slow-rising mists and drifting 
shadows, their broken utterances come vividly to 
mind with all the charm and restfulness of reality. 
Such experiences as one gleans firom a day among 
these mountain brooks makes one better and hap- 
pier ; for are they not of the perfect handiwork of 
God ? They are the unwritten sermons that reach 
the heart, not through the hearing, but through the 



AMONG THE HILLS. 20/ 

Soul. A few days later, as I left the Tip-top House 
to descend the loftiest of New England's hills, it 
was with a heart-throb of sincere regret that I 
bade farewell to the silver streams which ran out- 
ward to the Androscoggin, whose interv'ales never 
looked more charming and peaceful than on this 
midsummer morning. It was a long look, as one 
takes from parting friends who hope to meet 
again. 



MISTS. 



O sweet and fair the Autumn day, 

When blown Odobe?- slowly Jills 
The woods and vales luith purpling mists, 

And shadows linger on the hills ! 
Along the ivoodland paths the leaves 

Drop, silent tokens, at our feet ; 
So sun and frost make Nature'' s mood ; 

God gives the bitter with the sweet. 




MISTS. 
I. 

MEN a boy I was in the habit of riding 
occasionally with my father to the distant 
city, — distant I say : it seemed distant to 
me at that age, though it was a little less than 
forty miles from the farm, and to reach it in good 
season for the market , an early start was neces- 
sary. I well remember the impressions which my 
mind took on as we made one stage of the journey 
and another. About midnight the horse was 
hitched into the big wagon, well loaded down 
with garden-truck and fresh, yellow butter from 
the farm dairy ; and, closely tucked about with 
warm buffalo-robes, we started off on our long 
journey at a lively pace. The most familiar object 
by day looks most unfamiliar at night. The high- 
way seems as if its walls and fences had been 
spread wider, farther apart; the bushes by the 
roadside have grown with the dense shadows into 
huge, massy shapes, that reminded me of the 
descriptions of the genii, —those goblin forms of 
misty, vaporish outline which abound so freely 



212 MISTS. 

in the wonderful tales of the Vizier's daughter, 
Scheherezade, and which most boys have read at 
some time or another. The trees loomed up in 
the gloom of midnight like misshapen giants, 
full of threatening when the sk}^ was overcast, 
but when the stars were out the contour of their 
lofty tops shew more distinctly, but stark and 
black. What dim perspectives greeted us on 
every hand, indefinable, indistinct, and uncertain ! 
I could feel the dark as we went into the woods, 
as if it were something tangible ; and what a re- 
lief it was to get out of their blackness into the 
openings ! Houses looked like castles as we went 
by them, and the cattle by the pasture-fences and 
in the barn-yards seemed to be redoubled in size. 
The silence is noticeable ; the wagon-wheels roll 
along over the road with a soft, muffled sound, 
but the hoofs of the horse beat a sharply rhythmic 
measure as he trots down the hills and over the 
levels which alternate between. How the sparks 
flash out to the one side or the other as we bowl 
down the sharp pitches and over the ledges which 
crop out along the roadway. Only the fireflies 
are up at this early hour of the morning ; all else 
of insect-life is asleep. The whippoorwill and 
owl have gone to bed long ago. So we ride on 
through the warm atmosphere of the uplands and 
plunge down into the cooler moisture of the low- 
lands, and over the loose, sharply rattling planks 



MISTS. 213 

of the bridges. This is the hour of rising mists. 
At the foot of Jack's Hill the pond reaches north 
a good three miles ; and how white it is, as if 
covered with hoar-frost, — a level floor of snowy- 
like atmosphere, which leaves its dampness about 
our clothes and faces, but beautiful beyond com- 
parison as the dawn begins to break over the hills 
which hem it in. How swiftly it rises to hover 
reluctantly about the crests of the piny slopes with 
the first touch of sunshine ! The sun is the great 
disillusionist of fairy romance and of lowland 
mists. How these filmy coverlets of the stream 
fly upward with the winds which come with the 
sun. As the hours grow apace we are getting 
into lyong Meadows ; the sky is lighter to the 
eastward, and our vision is clearer. To the left 
are the Rattlesnake Mountains, and at their feet 
lie the fragrant acres of the intervales dotted with 
dark clumps of alder, which seem to be swimming 
in a sea of low fog. It comes up over the high- 
way. I hear the rattle and clatter of an approach- 
ing team, and we turn out into the bushes by the 
roadside to let it pass. As it comes into sight 
around a bend in the road how it towers above 
us in its misty surroundings! A friendly "Hal- 
loa!" and we are once more alone. We hear the 
singing shallows of the brooks, but we cannot see 
their waters, for they are hidden beneath slender 
threads of gossamer whiteness that wind grace- 



214 MISTS. 

fully around and among the dusky trunks of the 
trees to disappear in the deeper shadows beyond. 
But there is a shimmer of soft crimson flame high 
up on the sky, and the stars have blown out one 
by one, till only the morning star is left to wel- 
come the coming dawn. How it pales with the 
coming light, and how ruddy the horizon ! A 
robin in the orchard at our right whistles a bar 
or two of song, and then relapses into silence ; a 
moment later and the whole world is listening to 
a chorus of upland melody, and then a single voice 
takes up the strain. It is the meadow-lark, and 
what a wonderful song it is ! 

A monkish group in sober garb 

The pasture maples stand n 

Against the soft, gray sky. 
The -weathercock wakes with the wind ; 

The meadow-mists like fleets 

Of ghostly ships sail by. 
Seaward the ripples grow apace ; 

Morn, blushing like a girl, 

Betrays with rosy grace 
Her sun-god lover by her face. 

From dewy nest and meadow bloom 

The brown lark upward soars : 

His dusky-throated song 
Falls sparkling down, now faint, now clear, — 

A shower of liquid tones 

Strewn wood and field along, 



MISTS. 215 

Like drops of slanting, sunlit rain, — 

And breathless lies the earth 

To catch the wondrous strain 
That wooes the breaking day again. 

The lark for the morning, the water-thrush at 
night, and the day is fitly begun and ended. 
But there are signs of life at some of the farm- 
houses by the highway. Thin curling smokes 
climb upward into the sky from their chimney- 
tops, and there is a savory smell of burning wood. 
The farmer with drowsy look comes out with his 
tin milk-pail. He slowly rubs the sleep from 
his eyelids, and takes a good, long look at the 
sky, as if to make sure of the weather. It seems 
to me as if he is a late riser, — as if he should have 
been up long ago; but I find there are others 
farther along the way who have not started their 
kitchen fires, and whose herds are uneasy to be 
off to the pastures while they are wet with the 
savory dew. How slow some men are ! There 
is more or less humbug about these 

"Wise saws and modern instances," 

of which here is one that I have heard repeated 
so many times in boyhood, — 

"Early to bed and early to rise, 
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." 

Like many other things which sound well in the 



2l6 MISTS. 

ears of childhood these sayings grew stale with age. 
I never discovered much health, wealth, or wisdom 
in rising before the sun, in summer or winter, 
to start the fires or milk the cows and get them 
away to pasture while the older portion of the 
family got an extra snooze, because I never did 
it. I never thought the compensation quite equal 
to the labor performed. I found, as I began to read 
of people and events, that people made money in 
various ways, that few people were of perfect 
health, and that as for the wisdom of some of my 
neighbors, those who got up the earliest and went 
to bed at early candlelight had no doubt consid- 
erable of farm-lore which had been knocked into 
them in one way and another, but as for acquired 
knowledge which comes from books they really 
had none, nor were they conscious of their lack. 
Happy ignorance ! Man is something more than 
a machine, to do so much labor, to pile up so 
much wealth, solely to gratify a base, utterly 
selfish ambition. 

It is not a difiicult matter to accept the Darwinian 
theory of the origin of man, when 3^ou meet one 
of these over-industrious, over-alert, over-grasping 
farmers who turn night into day, and who run a 
race with the sun every morning, who push and 
hurry Dame Nature at every turn with their 
ploughs, hoes, and scythes, and driving fertilizers ; 
but these ' ' early to bed and early to rise ' ' philos- 



MISTS. 217 

opliers are now-a-days of a rare type, for whicli 
state of affairs the country lads and lassies should 
be duly grateful. 

But the sun is up, and the morning concert of 
the robins, the song-sparrows, and the bluebirds 
is over for the day. What a swift change has 
come over the sky ! It seemed but a moment ago 
when one could say, — 

" Down from the cloudless zenith the clear sky 
Stretches in rich crescendo of warm light, 
Till at the rim its brilliance blinds the sight 
With its accumulate splendor." 

But now the rosy flush has burnt out before the 
white flashing sunshine. From the high lands I 
can look down on wastes of forests which stretch 
far away to the southward horizon, and from the 
depths of which, sheeny columns of white vapor 
come up from countless springs and hidden streams, 
with many a delicate spiral curve and stately col- 
umn, as if they were the smokes of so many camp- 
fires. The pathways of the rivers are marked by 
sinuous bands of low-lying mists, which the cool 
night-air has been weaving in the looms of the 
fairies, while over the ponds and wayside pools 
hang wavering shallows of thin, diaphanous white- 
ness, which, like the nectar of Hebe's serving to 
Jupiter, are being carried by some invisible hand 
up to the courts of the Sun, and with which the 



2l8 MISTS. 

god of Day may allaj^ his thirst. What beautiful 
forms of cloud cumuli these watery distillations 
assume as they slowly climb the ladder of the sky ! 
what brilliant hues are theirs ! 

We can see the birds now, and they follow or 
precede us, hopping along the rails of the fences 
or flying from stake to stake. The raspbeny^- 
bushes are in full bloom, and overtop the fences 
vnth. luxuriant growth. They are swarming later 
in the day with bees and butterflies, and occasion- 
ally a humming-bird joins their company for a 
moment only, darting from blossom to blossom 
with jerk}'-, almost invisible flight, thrusting his 
long, slender bill into the fragrant blossoms here 
and there in search of his insect food. But the 
most numerous of the frequenters of the roadside 
are the yellowbirds, or thistle-birds, which scour 
the walls and orchard fences in troops of half a 
dozen or more. The 3'ellowbird has been called 
the "dandy" of the feathered tribes, and in 
shapely beauty and perfection of color he has 
no rival. He is a fellow of gregarious habit, and 
builds in the orchard or in the birches over the 
roadside wall. If 3^ou watch sharph^ j^ou will see 
in the fork of the broad-leaved maple a tiny nest, 
deftly, cunningly woven, with no loose strings 
hanging. The shreds of grayish birch-bark out 
of which it is constructed give it the color of the 
rind of the maple, so it is not easily distinguished ; 



MISTS. 219 

but it is there, and if you will take the trouble to 
look into it you will see three or four bluish- white 
eggs not over a half-inch in diameter. He is not 
a shy bird, but seems to delight in house-gardens 
as well as roadside tangles and field stubble. He 
keeps up a continual chatter as he jerks himself 
along from bush to bush. He is a bright spot in 
the landscape. 

The mountains are the breeding-places of the 
summer mists. How they linger with their bland- 
ishment of cloud caress about the steep sides and 
far-away summits, to later in the heat of the day 
roll down through the valleys in black thunder- 
gusts and torrents of pouring rain, on their way 
outward to the sea ; what dazzling hot flashes of 
flame illumine their gloomy depths as they sweep 
over the woods and fields with their besom of 
tempestuous storm ! What a gathering of the clans 
of the air, as cloud after cloud overlies each the 
other, towering majestically above the sun, shut- 
ting out little by little its brillance, and what 
a sultry foreboding lies over the hillsides and 
pasture-slopes ; but after the rain, the sun comes 
out, and the mists have begun to rise from the 
woods and meadows, and are not less beautiful as 
the sun goes down than at dawn. What sweet 
odors come up from the lowlands with the mist 
as the day dies out in the west after Nature has 
taken her bath. 



220 MISTS. 

The early days of spring, when the maple-tops 
have grown ruddy with bursting buds, when the 
snows have melted from the stubble in the fields, 
and before the April rains have set in for the 
spring house-cleaning, when the fields are soft and 
springy with superabundant wet, and not yet free 
of frost, are misty days as well. Along the hedges 
and walls are piled up the deep drifts of winter 
storms ; the ice is not yet out of the ponds, and 
the woodland slopes are still covered with the coat 
of winter. How the mist rolls down over the 
fields and brown tillage-lands, thick and drizzling 
like fine rain, now high, now low, hiding fences 
and trees in its opaque vapor. I have stood out 
on the lawn of the old farmhouse many a thick 
night listening to the honking of the wild-geese 
as they went their way in the darkness to the 
Canada marshes, and when they flew so low down 
that I could hear the flapping of their wet wings. 
I have seen many a northward flying flock of 
geese in the late afternoon spread out against the 
gray April mists like an old-fashioned crotch- 
harrow, sweeping lower and lower to alight at 
last amid the brown stubble of the uplands, and 
at night and in the morning I have crept stealth- 
ily along behind the shelter of the cobble-wall or 
behind the ragged stump-fence by the pasture, 
with antiquated queen' s-arm musket, a cumber- 
some flint-lock affair, to get a single shot at these 



MISTS. 221 

migratory waterfowl at a fruitlessly long distance. 
With what breathless anticipation did I peer 
through the interstices of my shelter, as I crawled 
so guardedly over the wet ground ; but my sport 
was all of anticipation. The flock seemed nearer 
in the mist than they were in fact. I could see 
them plainly enough as they loomed up in the 
fog, but upon the discharge of my musket they 
had disappeared as if by magic. 

Misty weather is always good mowing weather ; 
the grass cuts easily, and the heat of the hot 
July sun does not scald and burn as under a 
cloudless sky. Cutting wet grass is like a desert 
after a hearty dinner. The scythe will hold its 
edge a long time without grinding, and then you 
take your own time about it ; the sun is not driv- 
ing you here and there about the field with rake 
and pitchfork, and threatening you with low-rolHng 
thunder and swift-shod rain. Stop and pick all 
the blueberries you wish : what fine flavor they 
have, freshly plucked from the bushes that lie so 
thickly in our pathway! Farm-life has its com- 
pensations without stint and without number, and 
fresh fruits plucked afield count as one 



222 MISTS. 



II. 



If there was anything for which I had a real 
passion, it was to follow the meadow-brooks. No 
matter what the work was about the field or farm, 
the meadows, stretching up and down the broad 
valley, lay ever temptingly before me, a streak of 
soft yellowish-green verdure, and a part of the 
way I could trace the pathway of the brook in 
the sun-shine. I could see the old barns, or rather 
their slate-colored roofs, so still and deserted most 
of the year, and I knew that just opposite one of 
them was a dark pool where the trout congre- 
gated, and where I ever went first, and not with- 
out ample success. It was with the extreme of 
boyish delight that I was able to discern to the 
southward a low bank of gray, leaden-colored 
cloud as the afternoon wore away. I knew it 
meant a wet, misty morning for the morrow, and 
a cessation of farm-work as well. I doubt if I 
took a proper interest in the farm affairs ; but what 
boy ever does? Time enough when boys get to 
be men for them to begin the real work of life. 
Too many boys come up without realizing that 
they ever had any boyhood at all, and with the 
boy on the farm it is senseless folly on the part 
of the parent that he is looked upon as something 
that should be made to pay its way. Boys are 



MISTS. 223 

not machines, but they are too often treated as if 
they were. Boys have no sense of the fitness of 
things, and are often unreasonable in their Hkes 
and dislikes, but they are only boys, as various- 
minded as a weathercock, and as breezy and 
boisterous as a March wind. There is abundant 
time to build them into men without their being 
dwarfed by any strait-jacket of Puritan austerity, 
or by an arid, desert-like existence of an " all- 
work and no-play ' ' childhood, — a plan of build- 
ing by which many a boyhood has been made 
most miserable when it should have been a suc- 
cession of halcyon days to be remembered with 
pleasure, and to be looked back to with the single 
regret that they had not lasted longer. 

I used to hear my elders speak of the ' ' dispen- 
sations of Providence," as if all that occurred to 
mankind of good and ill was dispensed by a 
Divine Immutability. A misty morning seemed 
to me to be one of those providential happenings, 
but oftentimes my piscatorial ardor would be 
seriously dampened, for no sooner would I get 
into the meadows and fairly at my sport, than 
the sun would burn suddenly through the clouds, 
the mist would fall away over the woods, and with 
a lively sense of the importance of my presence 
in the corn-patch or hay-field, I would scamper 
up the woodland cattle-path, up across the pasture 
to the hill, to find the men busily at work hoeing 



224 MISTS. 

or turning the hay to the hot sun. I am afraid 
at such times my opinion of the weather-clerk's 
reliability was more or less shaken ; but it was 
no use to grumble over the matter, for I could 
not change the weather. 

At other times I would have the weather on my 
side, and the whole day to myself; and what a 
brief but delightful dwelling in Utopia it was ! 
What an acquaintance I struck up with the birds 
and muskrats in the blossoming meadows, nor 
were these children of Nature so shy of me as 
they seem to be now-a-days. I have no doubt but 
that they took the barefooted, homely-clad urchin 
who had come so quietly among them, and who 
stood so patiently, so purposeless, among the tall 
flowering rue and bluejoint in the open spaces by 
the alder-lined shallows of the brook, and which 
reached their rank growth almost to the brim of 
his ragged straw hat, to be as much of a vagabond 
as themselves. How often I have been startled 
out of a dreamy reverie, as if a shock had been 
transmitted to me bj^ some powerful battery, as I 
stood angling in the shadow of some round-topped 
elm. It is only the sudden plunge of a huge green 
bull-frog from the high bank into the brook, the 
unexpected appearance of a mink or of a muskrat 
swimming down stream, leaving a brown trail of 
muddy water behind him. The day is crowded 
with charming episodes. 



MISTS. 225 

I soon got to know all the birds, the thrushes, 
the scarlet- tanager, the cedar-birds, or, as many 
call them, the cherry-birds, the red-polls, and the 
Finch family as well, warblers and all. Altogether, 
they kept up a constant chatter the whole day 
through. 

I would often call the crows by imitating the 
owl. A half-dozen clever imitations of the hooting 
of this prowler of the night- woods, and what a 
gathering of the crows in the hemlock- tops over- 
head would come at my imitation of his single 
note. One b}^ one they would alight upon the 
dead spurs and topmost limbs of these tall trees, 
peering with a keen scrutiny into the shadows 
beneath as if to discover his owlship in his hiding. 
The owl is a coward by day, and how these black 
carrion-eaters "would annoy him did they once set 
their sharp eyes upon him ! When out with my 
gun I have frequently used the dismal cry of the 
owl to call this parson-looking fellow with his com- 
panions, a dozen or more at a time, about me in 
the woods, shooting one or two easily, but never 
more than that at one time. They are a very wary, 
suspicious bird, and it is generally a long shot 
that one gets when crow-hunting, but I could get 
nearer them on a wet, misty day than on a fair 
one. Hunting crows after the corn is planted is 
good sport. The tallest trees in the woods, the 
pines and hemlocks, are always selected by them 



226 MISTS. 

in which to build their nests, which are rather 
compact affairs, though sometimes spanning two 
feet in width. They are made of quite large sticks, 
and upon these are built up layers of coarse twigs 
from the tips of the fir and hemlock limbs, inwoven 
with strips of bark from the birch and cedar, and 
sometimes with moss, the whole being neatly 
lined with beech-leaves. It is quite an ingenious 
affair, take it altogether, — much more so than we 
might imagine from our knowledge of the habits 
of this bird. Three or four eggs are laid in the 
nest, which do not vary much from the dimensions 
of a smallish hen's egg. The crow's egg is of a 
clean, fresh greenish color, sometimes having more 
or less of a brownish tinge, and spattered with 
blotches of warm brown. They breed in great 
numbers ; but as birds I do not think they have 
one redeeming quality. They are robbers in the 
most emphatic sense of the term, and not only do 
they plunder the cornfield of its sprouting germs, 
but they rob the nests of the Sparrow, the Thrush, 
and the Warbler, of both eggs and young, upon 
which to feed their own offspring. They breed in 
colonies, and make the woods resound with their 
noisy clamor the whole morning through. The 
young crows are very noisy, filling the air with 
their grating squawks when disturbed by any 
strange sound, and are thereby easily located and 
as easily captured, if they have not left the nest. 



MISTS. 227 

Growing rapidly, they soon begin to fly short 
distances, and it is not long before they have 
learned the wary, meddlesome ways of their 
elders. 

Trout-fishing and crow-hunting is the regular 
thing for June in the woods of Maine. It is close- 
time to everything else, for field and run shooting 
do not come on until August, and only after the 
month of September has come in does one have 
the unrestricted run of the woods ; but what a 
fusilade awakes the silences of the woodland from 
this out ! Only the gray skies and flying snows 
put an end to the slaughter of the game-birds. 
Every boy who has a popper is out scouring the 
meadows, the wet runs, and the sunny slopes, 
where the needles of the sapHng-pine lie thickest 
and the purplish-red thorn-plum grows largest and 
juciest, for the plumy partridge. The gray squir- 
rels in the beech-woods by the cornfield do not 
escape his attention. I know one pot-hunter who, 
with a dog to tree the birds, shot in a single season 
nearly two hundred partridges. The woods in 
that section were fairly depopulated by this one 
man. 

The true sportsman gives his game a fair chance 
for life, and shoots it, if at all, awing. Partridge- 
shooting, with a well-trained dog to flush the 
birds, is rare sport, and abundant in zest and 
exercise ; and without setter or pointer, it is the 



228 MISTS. 

gunner's skill against the wit and instinct of the 
wariest of birds. Without a dog, a bag of three 
or four birds is all the best of hunters can expect 
in a single da}-, if the brood has been well scat- 
tered by other hunters. To tell a partridge from 
a pine-knot sticking up amid the leaves oftentimes 
requires the sharpest of eyesight. 

But the regal mists of the year come with the 
mellow daj^s of Autumn, when the heats of summer 
are beginning to abate, when the apples in the 
orchard are blushing with ruddy ripeness. Red- 
cheeked apples and red-cheeked boyhood, what 
is one without the other? The fruit of the old 
Astrachan apple-tree is as beautiful now as then, 
but the old-time zest is gone. They do not taste 
the same. The old Harvey tree throws its lichen- 
frescoed limbs out over the low-gaped wall, full 
of luscious, streaked fruit ; but the flavor of bo}^- 
hood seems lacking. How we watched for the 
falling fruit, scampering down to the trees through 
the grass dripping wet with the early morning 
dew in our eagerness for the first dropping apple, 
and how dextrously we dodged the worm-holes 
with our teeth as we devoured this first half- 
matured specimen of apple-kind. 

But how quiet are these Fall days ! From 
mid-September on, a month or more, is the most 
charming season of the year. It is the idyllic 
consummation of robust Summer's promise. What 



MISTS. 229 

dreamy repose, what tranquillity, broods over hill 
and valley ! Nature is full of suggestion of sleep, 
except for the sounds of domestic life about the 
farm. How slowly the snowy whiteness of the 
clouds goes sailing through the blue of the sky. 
They seem hardly to move, as if they were 
anchored amid-stream, becalmed with the rest of 
Nature. What a suggestive picture it is ! 

Indoors is rest and quietxide ; 

Across the threshold cool winds blow, 
And 'twixt my lintel-frame of wood 
Is framed a landscape of Corot ; — 
A dreamland wrought with subtile charm 
Of soft blue sky and drowsy farm. 
Inwoven with the song of vibrant thread 
And whirring wheel by household goddess sped. 

When the summer-work was over we would go 
to the fulUng-mill at a neighboring village to get 
the soft white woollen rolls which had been carded 
from the spring fleeces, and v/hich was always 
considered quite an event by the youngsters of 
the family, who regarded the machinery in the 
old mill with great curiosity and interest. I re- 
member the fuller as a great practical joker, a 
man of strange quips and pranks, and who was 
a favorite with the farmer-wives of the section. 
The big spinning-wheel had its own corner, and 
woe to the urchin, who interfered with the sanctity 
of its surroundings ! but I am afraid its broad- 



230 MISTS. 

banded periphery got many a clandestine slap and 
twiri when mother was out of sight. In fact I 
know it did, and to the infinite satisfaction of 
the youthful culprit. The reel-stand was another 
coveted plaything, but the old spinning-wheel 
possessed the superior attraction. In the stillness 
of the short afternoons its busy, whirring melody 
could be heard for some considerable distance. 
The music of the spinning-wheel alternated at 
unequal periods with the waltz-like measure of 
the cumbersome wooden loom in the woodshed 
chamber, where the homely all-wool blankets and 
Canada grays, the real home-spuns for the boys and 
girls, were slowly and laboriously wrought. What 
fun to throw the great shuttle as the sleys went 
up and down with one pedal or the other ! Here 
was romance indeed ! 

Most of the birds had gone south a few days in 
advance of the first frosts, and how diligently we 
watched for them, and with what care did we 
cover the tender-fruited vines in the garden with 
odd hay-caps and quilts ; even the weekly news- 
paper was pressed into service on these occasions. 
It was one kind of farm husbandry. We had no 
hammocks then to swing between the elms, but 
there was the carpet of soft grass, dotted with the 
shadows of the door-yard trees. How often have 
I lain along the sloping lawn with face to the sky 
watching the cloud-yachts racing from west to 



MISTS. 23 1 

east with only the helmsman of the wind to steer 
them, and what stretches of canvas they spread 
to the swift air-currents ! What a succession of 
bright, sunny days and cool nights, and how 
refreshing they were after the restless tossings 
and broken slumber of torrid August. At this 
time of the year, when a storm is brewing, the 
atmosphere is remarkably clear, except that the 
outline of the woods is somewhat softened by a 
warm low-lying haze. Otherwise it is one of the 
alert daj-s when the sense of outdoor enjoyment 
is at concert-pitch, when Nature seems in perfect 
tune, and more conscious of herself. We throw 
books aside, and lounge about the orchard-slopes 
back of the red farmhouse under the apple-trees. 
What a medley of sound comes up from the wooded 
valley below, where the choppers among the hem- 
locks are finishing the work of June, swamping 
logging-roads to the river, or parading the felled 
timber for the logging-teams. I can hear their 
"halloos!" distinctly. There is an intermittent 
discharge of guns as the sportsmen beat the covers 
of birch and alder for woodcock or the pine-levels 
for partridge. Half-way down the pasture-side is 
a broad ledge of granite, and just at its lower 
edge are grouped together a few red-oaks and 
maples, and in their tops is gathered a conclave 
of jays ; their discordant notes make but a jangled 
tune at best. Like some people, their speech 
betrays their disposition. 



232 MISTS. 

lyying there on the same orchard-slopes in the 
shadows of the same old wide-branching trees less 
than a year ago, with the woods and meadows 
spread out below me, with the broad lake of the 
Sokokis shining misty-like in the autumn sun- 
shine far away to the south, the snow-capped peak 
of the loftiest of the White Hills, with its darker 
blue foot-hills filling the west, with many a rolling 
ridge and valley between, — 

I heard as in an old-time dream 
Of long midsummer afternoon 
The broken measure of a stream, — 

A rhyme of Nature set to tune. 
Beyond the orchard-fence the tree-toad sang 
At intervals with strident notes, that rang 
Out prophecies of damp sea-mists and coming rain, — 
And o'er the woods the wild loon's trumpet strain; — 

and later on at nightfall the moon came up with 
the mists that swept with a lofty stride over the 
roofs and tree-tops back toward the mountains, to 
return a day or two later laden with raw, cold 
wet. Rain is one of the beneficent events in 
nature. Day after day, through the long, sultry 
summer-time, the sun has been drinking dry the 
springs and smaller rivers. The surface moisture 
disappeared long ago. The earth is like a sponge, 
pressed dry, but with the heavy autumn rains its 
thirst is slaked. The farm-wells and lowland 
springs are reinforced for the long rainless winter. 



MISTS. 233 

Happy is the farmer whose cattle do not have to 
plough their way to the pasture watering-places 
through deep, drifting snows ! An abundant sup- 
ply of water at the house and barn is one of the 
economies of the farm. 



III. 

There is rarely any part of the j^ear more 
enjoyable than autumn. The season is generally 
a succession of clear days, — days of such perfect- 
ness that at any other time they would be char- 
acterized as individual weather-breeders, breeders 
of storms, — but I doubt. if much faith can be put 
in such as storm prophecies. When such remark- 
ably fine days follow each other with the same 
enjoyable repetition the weather-wise persists in 
regarding the last, if it be the much better day, 
as a precursor of rain ; but for all that, the rain 
does not come, only "hard weather" instead. I 
well remember an expression one of these assistant 
weather-clerks was accustomed to use when his 
weather prophecies came to naught. Hat in hand 
he would scan the clear blue above, and listen for 
the sounds from the woods ; he would hold up one 
finger to the breeze to get its direction, or would 
call you to look at an ant-hill to note the extraor- 
dinary activity of its dwellers, and to numberless 
other signs, only to exclaim, in his perplexity, 



234 MISTS. 

"Well, this 'ere 's masterly weather; beats all 
natur', sir ; kink in the chain somewhere, depend 
on 't." Our wonderfully clear days, whenever they 
occur, are generally crisp, dry days, and are not 
at all premonitory of storm, though storms some- 
times follow closely upon the heels of a single 
fine day, — storms of long continuance and abund- 
ant in wet. I have known many a rare day to be 
followed b)^ a series of rarer daj^s, the atmosphere 
of which was so clear, so perfectly transparent, 
that far-away objects could be discerned with 
marked distinctness, when sounds smote upon the 
ear with phenomenal articulateness, even when 
borne from far-away places. All sounds have a 
bell-like quality on such days, which enables them 
to pierce the air arrow-like, clear, crisp, and pen- 
etrating. Many a time have I rode along the 
highway when I could distinguish the conversation 
of the people in the farmhouses, as its sound came 
out through the half-raised windows, and which 
I have no doubt was carried on in the ordinary 
tone of voice. So I have caught bits of the con- 
versation of the hay-makers at work on the hill- 
slopes. I remember an old-fashioned clock which 
has occupied the same narrow shelf ever since I 
first saw it in my boyhood, whose silvery-toned 
strokes I have many a time counted in the low- 
lands nearly half a mile away, as it told by its 
accentuated speech the time of day to the house- 



MISTS. 235 

hold whose master had wound up its heavy weights 
every night for a half-century, with few excep- 
tions ; and it was a fairly common stroke, ordinarily 
speaking. On such occasions the air was in a 
state of perfect calm. 

Transmission of sound depends in degree upon 
atmospheric conditions, coupled with the advantage 
of favorable wind-currents, though in general the 
motion of the air is hardly noticeable, if at all. 
On some days Nature's batteries are in better 
working order than on others, and the invisible 
telephones of the air transmit messages without 
that difficulty so apparent on other days, when 
Nature generates less of electricity. 

There are days when it seems as if all the wires 
were down, when farm sounds hesitate to jump 
the walls and fences which bound the home domain, 
when the air is full of barriers and insurmountable 
obstructions, when the old tin dinner-horn, blow 
hard as you may, falls far short of the field or 
meadow. Have you ever tried to halloo on such 
a day ? How choked and smothered-like your 
voice, as if you were cooped up in a box or an 
empty barn, or some other limited space ! A boy, 
amid-field, I have caught the softened, prolonged 
note of the locomotive whistle coming to me over 
a ten-mile stretch of field, forest, and pond, as I 
wrought in the morning sunshine with plough or 
scythe. My attention arrested, I could hear the 



236 MISTS. 

clatter of the distant car-wheels as well. The 
enunciation of sound was wellnigh perfect, but 
this occurred only in the absence of any wind 
motion, or when the current set toward me from 
the eastward, and then always in the morning or 
in the late afternoon, but never at midda3^ Fre- 
quently after a storm is over, but before the clouds 
have begun to clear away, the same phenomena 
will be observed. Upon ever)^ occurrence of like 
character the field- workers would prophesy rain : 
"That means rain," or "Rain to-morrow" ; and 
the plans for a rainy morrow, or day after, go on 
with great activity ; but no rain came, nor was it 
a "dry time," when "all signs fail." When the 
clouds are ripe with rain the rain comes, and not 
until then ; when their . cisterns are full the earth 
gets the overflow, and that is all. Nature never 
exhausts herself with needless giving. She is 
thriftiness itself. See how she gathers up the mists 
at morn and night to send them down in pattering 
drops elsewhere despite the complainings of man- 
kind ! Nature has but little consolation for these 
human weather-builders and chronic grumblers. 
When I hear some people talk about the weather, 
I think of one of Parson Sam Jones's sayings, 
" Many farmers would like to swap sides with God. 
They would like to put him in ploughing, and let 
them do the raining and shining." 

Each day is an individual type different in some 



MISTS. 237 

degree from another. They are hke people, they 
carry a general resemblance to their kind, but are 
utterly unlike each other, — a total of sun, cloud, 
and wind, which means much or little to the pro- 
fessional weather-wise. I have heard the tree-toad 
many an afternoon in the summer, but he was a 
poor prophet if he was singing up the rain ; so 
with the cuckoo. The wind bloweth wheresoever 
it listeth, and so with the wet in the clouds, it 
drops when and where it will. There is a great 
deal of the winter muskrat- theory in this foretelling 
of storms by the particular complexion of one day 
or another. Even barometric disturbances are not 
alwaj^s proof of coming foul or fair weather, as 
everybody knows who has ever hung a barometer 
for any length of time to his door-post. The 
weather is a combination of freaks, with precedents 
of a most uncertain character. He is a rare phi- 
losopher who with uncomplaining spirit takes it as 
it comes, believing that Nature is a sufl&cient law 
unto herself, with her seasons of wet and dry, of 
scant apparel and of abundant livery. 

With the ending of the -first week in September, 
those most uncertain days of the year, when Sirius 
is at the head of stellar affairs, are over. The Dog- 
star abdicates of necessity, and none too soon for 
the comfort of his subjects, who have grown dis- 
gusted with such a vacillating, temporizing, char- 
acterless regime.' It is neither the one thing nor 



238 MISTS. 

the other, neither sunshine nor storm, but rather an 
agglomeration of all that is irresolute in the weather. 
Its air-currents are roily with smoky, misty sedi- 
ment, which is ever settling down upon the hills 
and choking the valleys with its turbidness. 

No need to study the weather now. No misty 
mornings, when you feel certain of rain one mo- 
ment and of sunshine the next, getting neither. 
No more ebb and flood of dense fog- tides and driz- 
zling sea-mists swept up toward the hills on raw 
east-winds. The days of alternate east-winds and 
of scalding suns have ebbed slowly to the south, 
and in their stead have come the golden days of 
Autumn, with bright, clear skies, and cool, starry 
nights, when the harvest-moon hangs itself nightly 
above the fields, — the sign for the ingathering of 
the crops, when the corn-shuckings or country 
husking-parties are to inaugurate their rounds of 
rustic gayety. The cornfields hold their bright 
green color into September, when their tossing 
plumes take on a reddish tinge, and their downy 
silks, the emerald floss on each ripening ear, fades 
out into the hue of old-gold, and the long, graceful 
leaves grow paler, with deep purplish streaks run- 
ning from the stalk to their tips. The kernel is 
in the milk ; but a month later, the farmer, with 
sharp, gleaming sickle, is at work afield, and hill 
after hill, standing stalwart in the mellow October 
sun, lies where its shadows have fallen through 



MISTS. 239 

the long summer, flat upon the brown earth among 
the thick- trailing pumpkin- vines that have just 
begun to blacken with the early frosts. Gathered 
into bundles, and tied up with some of these same 
pumpkin-vines, they are set up about the old 
wooden ' ' shocking-horse, ' ' their yellow spindled 
tops bound firmly about with a slender slip of 
withe-rod ; then, drawing the long cross-pin, and 
carefully removing the "horse," the corn-shock is 
built. So the farmer goes over his field until the 
corn is "shocked," when the barren rows, with 
their garnishment of gray weeds, their blackened 
vines and bitter wormwood, lend their more sober 
suggestions of the waning year. 

How the bluejays fly from one end of the field 
to the other, shouting "Jay, jay, jay ! " " Wlieow, 
wheow, wheow ! " or " Pe-e-n, pe-e-n, pe-e-n ! " 
This last note is a peculiarly beautiful one, and 
when emitted in the woods, or in the lowland 
meadows, has a renewed charm. It is of a won- 
derfully clear timbre, and flies far through and 
over the autumn woods. It is one of those notes 
which one in the country learns to associate with 
the sound of partridge-drumming and with mel- 
low, yellow atmospheres, with stilly afternoons and 
woodland silences. Once heard it is never forgot- 
ten by any one who has half a heart for Nature, 
but this single bell-like note is the only thing this 
feathered thief has to recommend himself to our 
notice, except his brilliant plumage. 



240 MISTS. 

A cornfield is one of the picturesque things about 
the farm. A patch of warm brown in a field of 
russet green, and all about its edge are ranked in 
single-file the dusky, rain-blackened bean-stacks, 
like so many outposts or pickets. Over the corn- 
field are thickly strewn the golden globes of the 
pumpkin, in and between the regularly laid out 
rows of shocks a-dr3'ing in the wind. What queer 
shapes these corn pyramids take on day by day as 
the rain beats them down ! Here are some with 
sides bent in as if courtesying to its neighbor, 
here are fat old women in huge skirts and yellow 
waterproofs, and Indians with feathered head-dress 
tossing in the breeze ; one in particular looks like 
a pair of dancers awhirl in the dizzy mazes of a 
waltz or galop. At its farther edge the field is 
bounded by a " stab-and-run ' ' fence, each rail 
and stake making a sharp black line against the 
golden haze of the sky that makes the horizon of 
the hill-slope. So the corn ripens in wind and 
sun till the farmer piles its rustling stalks and 
golden treasure into the old ox-cart to be carried 
down over the long hill to be dumped, load after 
load, into the long, narrow floors of the barns. 
The whole length of one side of the floor is walled 
up with fragrant mows of hay. 

The unhusked corn in the great floors lies four 
or five feet in depth, and if not husked out rapidly 
will ' ' heat, ' ' and the corn will become mouldy and 



MISTS. 241 

worthless for man or beast. Invitations are sent 
out to the young farmer-folk to come to the husk- 
ing. It is as much a season of merr-y-making as 
of work, and the invitations are eagerly accepted. 
But what a busy time for the housewife ! What 
pots of baked-beans, what pans of brown-bread, 
and what dozens of pies of pumpkin, apple, and 
mince, go into the huge brick oven ! what knead- 
ings of pastry and of fresh, flaky crust occupy the 
intervening time of preparation ! What bustling 
to and fro of matronly housewife and red-cheeked 
maid in anticipation of the household event of the 
year, and what secret errands the boys have run 
these last two days to the grocery at the "Cor- 
ners ' ' ! The house breathes the delicate perfume 
of plum-puddings, of pies and pastry, and of 
steaming baked-beans, as if Thanksgiving had 
come prematurel}'^ ; and what a dainty perfume it 
was ! Lrubin has no extract whose .odor can ap- 
proach it, — this Epicurean fragrance of a typical 
New England farm kitchen. Call it a smell if you 
will, but later j^ears have found no substitute for 
the homely sweets of boyhood, and they never will 
for me. No blaze ever looked so cheery as that 
which gleamed out from the wide mouth of the 
old-fashioned brick oven, with its cord-wood sticks 
crackling so musically within, and when its fires 
went down, and the embers were raked out and 
piled up on the hearth of the big fireplace beside 



242 MISTS. 

it, what a dull red glow stained its overarching 
walls as they slowly cooled before the mistress 
should come with her brimming pots and dishes, 
which were, like the three worthies, to be tried 
as they never were before. What flavor, what 
piquancy of taste, the old oven lends to these 
viands of the true New England table ! and to the 
boy and girl of those days they taught some very- 
simple likings, but likings which were never to 
be forgotten, wherever their lot in life may have 
taken them. 

The day dawns magnificently, but the hours 
crawl with snail-like pace toward the sunset. 
Every house in the neighborhood has struck up 
an anticipatory note of preparation, of lover and 
maiden, of the glutton, who always invites himself, 
and who, though uninvited, succeeds in making 
himself useful, and of the younger married people, 
who have not forgotten the generous hospitality 
of their host and hostess on former occasions, and 
its accompanying jollities. The sun is down, 
and the big round moon is up. Hardly has the 
dreamy autumn twilight set in than the teams 
come driving up the steep roadway to the farm- 
house, singly and by twos and threes ; what stal- 
wart young men and what buxom farmer-girls, 
in their plain garb of calico and homespun, "fixed 
up" for the husking. By eight o'clock the work 
begins at the barn in earnest. Opposite the hay- 



MISTS. 243 

mows the buskers array themselves with chair, 
box, or milking-stool, and now and then there is 
a Hvely scuffle between some of the young men for 
a place beside some one of these comely country 
girls, whose personal charms have made her more 
attractive and sought after ; and the successful 
fellow wins the noisy plaudits of his companions. 
It is all in fun, however, and the young woman 
appeases the disappointed rival by allowing him to 
see her home later in the evening. The country 
girl is as much a diplomat as her cousin of the 
city, and will oftentimes lead her by an arm's- 
length, if not more. None are shrewder in mat- 
ters of love than she. It is instinct more than 
accomplishment. 

Behind the buskers are the lintels or tie-ups, 
where the cattle stand in unwonted quiet, forget- 
ting to chew their ruminant cuds in the curiosity 
aroused by this noisy activity. Their horns clash 
with sharp, querulous sound against the hornbeam 
stanchions as if of questioning at the uproar in the 
big floors, and one by one they lie down with 
a big snort of satisfaction, and relapse into sleep 
and silence. 

At intervals along the haymows pitchforks are 
stuck, from the ends of which hang the sperm- 
oil lanterns, a half a dozen or more, and which 
light up the scene quite brilliantly. What a Rem- 
brandtesque picture it is ! The light flares into 



244 MISTS. 

the darkness with strong lateral rays. Above and 
below the lantern-flames light up but dimly. What 
a study of high lights and of deep shadows ! The 
poultry hardly understand this invasion of their 
domains, and from the great beams which are in 
shadow, and which seem to be a great ways above 
the floor, come notes of complaining from the 
flock as some ringing peal of laughter awakes 
the echoes of the dusty rafters. The husking goes 
on rapidly ; baskets are filled with swift repetition, 
and the husked stalks are thrown upon the scaf- 
folds, where they are dextrously stowed away. 

The finding of a red ear by one of the girls is 
a signal for all the boys to take the toll of a kiss 
from the lips of the blushing damsel. Some of 
the more bashful maidens, if by chance they came 
across one of these waifs of osculatory fortune, 
would put the dreaded ear surreptitiously behind 
them, but in so doing they seldom escaped the 
sharp eyes of their companions, who were ever on 
the lookout for such happenings ; for the girls 
were considered fair game at these country husk- 
ings. Occasionally a smut-ball plucked from some 
mongrel stalk would go shying across the barn, to 
leave a black smooch upon the face or white shirt- 
front of some dandified fellow, — for there are dan- 
dies in country as well as in town, — and his confu- 
sion and evident irritation were richly enjoyed. 

The husks are pulled, or rather stripped, from the 



MISTS. 245 

last ear ; and what a race there is for the house 
to get at the water and towels ! and then the sup- 
per is served piping hot, with an abundance of 
fragrant coffee and the rarest of cream ; and what 
comical episodes followed in its train ! Husking 
is a great whetter of youthful appetites, and the 
inroads made by the boys and girls into the ample 
array of eatables may well be imagined, from the 
fact that the tables were often cleared of everything 
edible, and 5'et none went away hungry. 

After the supper, all lent a hand in clearing the 
old kitchen of its furniture, and the thumbing of 
a violin-string gave hint of what was to follow. 
The musician of the neighborhood had brought 
his fiddle along with him, and as he got its strings 
into tune the boys were selecting their partners 
and getting into position. A kitchen break-down 
is one of the bygone amusements. It is only in 
those sections of the country where much of the 
primitive in society remains that the pastime is 
now indulged in. It is a rollicking sort of an 
afiair, full of virile action, and not much akin 
to the fashionable dancing-party of the present 
day. Denman Thompson, as "Uncle Josh," gives 
one a fair idea of its exaggeration of movement, 
and yet those who have experienced the exhilara- 
tions of those far-away days will tell 3^ou that the 
modern ways of Terpsichore's children are flat 
and insipid, with their mincing steps and full- 
dress manners. 



246 MISTS. 

Never myself much of an enthusiast as regarded 
this genteel art, or rather accomplishment, I never 
failed, however, to derive great enjoyment as one 
of the on-lookers at these hilarious events, — for 
they were hilarious to a degree, — and never was 
my fill of mirth so overflowing at its brim as 
when the fiddler had mounted the deal- table in 
the kitchen, with his stool, and after a preliminary 
scraping and drawing of his bow, as if to make 
sure of his ground, he had started off with the 
rollicking, tearing, half-lunatic "Virginia Reel," 
and the boys and girls, taking the cue, made the 
most of its lively sentiment and quaint move- 
ments. The fiddler was an oddity himself, and 
whatever he played seemed to partake of much of 
his personality. His every movement was provo- 
cative of mirth, and his contortions of bowing 
bordered upon the ridiculous. How his eyes twin- 
kled with suppressed mirth as the fun grew more 
fast and furious ! 

What grand places these old country kitchens 
were for a country frolic, with their spacious 
rooms and dark wainscoted walls, with their 
dingy, smoky ceilings ! This old kitchen which I 
have in mind would accommodate three quadrille 
sets easily. On one side was a deep fireplace, 
with wide flaring jambs, its bricks worn smooth, 
ruddy, and soot-stained. It seemed an alcove 
where a half-dozen people might stand erect, with 



MISTS. 247 

only the clear sky looking down into the chimney- 
top above them, and above ran the long narrow 
mantel, where sat a row of rough tallow-dips, 
which were run in tin moulds by the housewife, 
a dozen at a time, and which lighted the room 
but dimly with their flickering, sputtering flames, 
the snuffing of which kept some one busy most of 
the time clipping here and there with the old long- 
handled iron snuffers, most likely an heirloom 
from some former generation, at their burned and 
toppling wicks. This was the light of other days, 
but it served its purpose well. Our rugged, hard- 
working ancestors were not so particular about 
their bedtime as their descendants are, and men 
were more honest then than now. Those were 
times when the latch-string hung always in plain 
sight on the outside of the door, night as well as 
day. 

The frosts were whitening the fields and pas- 
tures without in the cool October night, but the 
'blaze on the broad hearth had been allowed to 
go down, so only the smouldering embers shone 
dully-like out upon the worn floor of spruce. A 
long, black crane swung its arm straightly across 
the dull red coals, black and shapely in its strength, 
and pregnant with the romance of many a Thanks- 
giving and Christmas dinner, speaking loudest in 
its gloomy silence of a bygone race who had hung 
it with stout and wide-eyed staple to the side of 



248 MISTS. 

the chimney, no doubt with humble and pious in- 
vocation. What sights of homely revellings and 
rugged cheer it had looked out upon ! What sto- 
ries of the backwoods and of early settlement are 
bound up within its staid inaction of to-day ; for 
it has swung here since the roof- tree of pine was 
planted, and that was generations ago, when the 
broad level highway beside its door was hardly 
better than a woodland path. Overhead were long 
poles reaching from one end of the room to the 
other, suspended on iron hooks or staples ; and 
stretching across from one to the other were hosts 
of sun-tanned loops or strings of cored apple, 
drying for household use, or for the market at the 
seaport, which lay some thirty miles beyond the 
hills at the south. What a grateful fragrance of 
orchard blossoms they lent to the room with its 
low ceiling ! What a delicate odor dropped down 
from those festoons of domestic cheer ! Hardly an 
orchard-tree but has lent of its bount}^, its wealth 
of fruitage, to this mellow garnishing of the old 
kitchen. What a delightful romance of primitive 
farm-life it was, that tinged the shifting lights 
and shadows of this scene with a never-to-be- 
forgotten zest and pleasure. Conventionality was 
in utter abeyance. In fact, it was unknown. It 
was unnecessary, for there were no strangers 
within the gates ; it was purely a neighborhood 
affair, and mirth ruled the hours into the morning 
not infrequently. 



MISTS. 249 

The signal for the breaking up of the husking- 
party was deferred to the last moment. There 
were no dance-cards, jvitli tiny nickle-tipped pen- 
cils and dainty dangling ribbons, in those days. 
The boys and girls went to dance and to have a 
good time ; and have a good time they did, with 
abundant spirit and grace. Nothing of the kind 
was needed, though there was many a quiet under- 
standing betwixt lad and lassie which lasted 
through life oftentimes. 

On the old deal table in the corner of the 
kitchen was a huge tray of ruddy-cheeked apples, 
and a good-sized mug of sweet cider, newly made 
in honor of the occasion. To keep them company 
was the armless, backless chair where the fiddler 
sat, coaxing one tune and another from his violin, 
beating time loudly with one foot, and calling off 
figure after figure. The boys and girls stand 
expectant in their places, and "Ready all!" says 
the prompter, and then came the exhilarating 
strains of Durang's Hornpipe, Fisher's Hornpipe, 
of quaint old Money-Musk, of Rob Roy, and of 
numerous other tunes common to those days, when 
the French dancing-master, M. Rideau, taught the 
tripping art at the little hamlet in Maine where 
Hawthorne passed a part of his childhood. What 
a cutting of "pigeon's wings," what "double- 
shufflings ' ' and shaking of cow-hide boots, — for 
they were fashionable in those days ; what a snap- 



250 MISTS. 

ping of calico skirts, as some lively youngster took 
his partner down the centre to make the turn at 
the foot of the set, to bring her back flushed and 
panting with the exercise. No wonder our mothers 
grew buxom with such homety jollity. What a 
"laugh and grow fat" philosophy it was! What 
a ruddy glow bloomed out upon the cheek when 
the last strain died away, and the violin was 
silent. 

It has grown light in the east, and the moon is 
low down in the west ; the kitchen has settled into 
its accustomed quiet, and the household is asleep. 
The corn is husked, and to-morrow is to be carried 
to the floor under the woodshed rafters to season 
before going into the cribs. The house-cat has a 
preoccupied look now-a-days, as she wanders from 
kitchen to corn-loft, and the squirrels and mice 
find many of their well-laid plans to " gang agley." 
What a scampering over the corn by these rodents, 
as puss appears upon the scene ! what interruptions 
of feasts clandestine, as she leaps with noiseless 
bound amid her lawful prey ! 

But what a change has come over the landscape 
with the October frosts ! What golden hues the 
summer mists have taken on ! What painter this, 
whose 

"Touch hath set the wood on fire 
Whose falchion pries the chestnut-burrs apart? 
It is the Frost, a rude and Gothic sprite." 



MISTS. 251 

The mists that, as Edith Thomas says, all the 
summer night lie along the river-marsh, 

"And at their looms swift shuttles ply, 
To weave them nets wherewith the streams to drain, 
And often in the sea they cast their seine. 
And draw it, dripping, past some headland high," 

have grown white, and lie along the stubble in the 
fields, and low down among the sedge and bull- 
rushes in the swamps ; but as the sun comes up 
they are let loose and hang about the margins of 
the woods and over the slopes that lead up to the 
summits of the hills. What tints of opal and 
of amethyst they hold within their magic warp 
and woof; what topaz glories crown the autumn 
days; what tuneful silences lull the midday hours. 
With what subtle arts has Nature wrought this 
beauty for herself of earth and sky is known alone 
to God, whose handmaiden Nature is. It is for 
man to read the lesson with his heart, and then 
to tell his fellow-man. 

These autumn mists are the mists of June grown 
older This mellow atmosphere, these days of 
old-o-old studies of tree and shore, of soft, yellow, 
shimmering mists, of half-Hghts among the woods 
where the leaves drop thickest, and of occasional 
clear gray skies, are the rareripes of the whole year. 
They stay with us until the Indian Summer has 
come and gone, until the earth has closed her 



252 MISTS. 

pores with iron bands of frosts ; and with the first 
spit of snow they come back, the air}^ sprites of 
the clouds, to whiten all the fields, where in the 
blossoming summer-time they had many a curvet 
and romp with the winds, and many a blushing 
caress from the sun. Sometimes they slip the leash 
of winter, and in a single night gild the trees, 
the birch and wayside hazel-bushes, the rocks and 
fences, not forgetting even the ragged pine-stumps 
in the pasture, with a marvellous fretwork of 
crystal splendor, that flashes in the morning sun- 
shine from every crest and pinnacle, — the romance 
of another world. It is only for a day, and the 
glory of the frozen mists is nipped "in the bud." 
lyike the birds, the mists are akin to warmer 
weather, and with them they haunt meadow and 
upland, the favorites of the fairies and of mankind. 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 



For him who tends the tireless loom 

Of years without repining. 
The world is full of song and bloom. 

The skies are full of shinifig ; 
Ana they who catch its tiuiefid strain, 

Or breathe its summer S7ueetness, 
May homeward drive the creaki7ig waifi 

Of autumn^ s rare completeness. 




BLACKBERRY-VINES. 
I. 

HERE is nothing in the round of country- 
life abounding in more hvely zest or more 
pleasurable exertion than an excursion to 
the blackberry slopes in the late summer, when 
the season is at its flood, — when the sun hangs 
at midday directly overhead, and drops the heavy- 
weight of its heat straight down into the meadows, 
where the mowers are finishing up the season's 
haying. Along the uplands the winds blow up 
cool in the afternoon, but the birds of song seem 
to have lost courage. The bobolink is silent for 
once, and it is only in the woods that we may- 
listen to anything that would pass for a song under 
the skies of June. The catbird and thrush keep 
up their notes, though less generous of them as 
the season grows into the mellowness of the first 
autumn month. I suppose they are like all Bo- 
hemians who have gleaned field after field in search 
of new enjo3^ments, — they have had their fill of 
New England life, and are already planning their 

255 



256 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

migratory journey. They must be very busy with 
their thought, to grow so stingy of their song. 

The blackberry is the last of all the wild berries 
to ripen ; and what luscious fruitage lurks amid 
its low-trailing vines along the farm boundaries, 
over-running the cobble-stone half-wall, its half- 
rail fence oftentimes serving as a trellis against 
which it leans with a graceful abandon. The 
blackberry is a saunterer by the wayside margins 
and country roads, where you will meet it at 
almost every turn if you will but take the trouble 
to scrutinize the fences. The high-bush grows in 
the interstices of stake and rail, by some white- 
flowering thorn, or in the midst of a wild tangle 
of briar close to the edge of the wheel-rut, where 
every passing team gives it a swish with its 
loosely rattling spokes. It is a magnificent 
grower ; like the wayside tramp it is, it has a 
wonderful reserve force in its roots ; for break it 
down, plough it up, freeze the life out of it, when 
the tramp season opens, up conies our blackberry- 
vine as stout and vigorous as ever ; its bright 
purple stalks, virile and full-blooded, creep up 
day by day to overtop the tallest of the highway 
fences. What a vagabond, what a wayward wild- 
ing, this child of Nature is ! Often I have 
searched for the plump, juicy fruit of this bramble 
"when out with gun or rod, and one never knows 
in what secluded nook or sunny opening it waits 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 257 

for his coming in the closing days of August or 
in the earlier days of mild September. Very unex- 
pectedly it reaches out across your path as you 
make some jaunt through the woods or over the 
hills, its brilliant leafage tinged with the richest 
dyes of crimson and purple, with top heavily 
bowed down under its dusky burden. In these 
black, glistening shapes, so much like an old-fash- 
ioned straw beehive in miniature, is concentrated 
the voluptuousness of summerhood ; and in the 
graceful sweep and bending lines of these vines, 
thick with sharp, dangerous spines that prick and 
tear without mercy, the quality of sensuousness in 
Nature finds its perfect expression. Not infre- 
quently it grows to the height of ten and twelve 
feet ; and right royal is its blossoming in June, its 
tops making a mass of petals as white as the 
driven snow. A strange freak of Nature is it 
not, that the blackberry flower should be so much 
after the pattern of the snowflake, while its fruit 
is of such a rich dusky purple ? Nature is full of 
quips and pranks and of precious secrets, which 
are well hidden within the mysterj^ of her silences. 
They are as blind to men as were the secrets which 
Cassim Baba thought to discover with his ' ' Open 
Wheat ! " — "Open Barley ! " — for few have the 
' ' open sesame ' ' to the treasures which Nature has 
in her keeping. It is said that love will go where 
it is sent ; the same is true of the secrets of the 



258 BLACKBERRY- VINES. 

woods, the streams, the plants and living things 
as well, — the harder we press them for an answer 
to our curious questionings the more knowledge 
they grant us, the more they tell us of themselves. 
A high-bush blackberry jaunt in my boyhood 
days was something to be pleasurably anticipated. 
It meant a day on the steep slopes of Porcupine, 
a rugged peak some three miles to the northwest 
of the farm, — a natural p5^ramid or landmark, 
stoutly built up on all sides with huge ramparts 
of rock, and crowned, with the exception of a few 
openings of stunted pasturage along the lower 
half of its base, with leafless,, storm-beaten tree- 
trunks that stood stark and silent and fire-black- 
ened, pointing straight skyward as they have 
always since I can remember. Years ago a holo- 
caust of fire swept up over this mountain. It 
was in the latter part of the summer-time, and for 
weeks there had been no rain. The scurf of leafy 
deposit which had been a half-century accumulat- 
ing beneath its thick growth of pine and birch 
made a fuel apparently unquenchable once ignited. 
The blaze once underway soon became a grand 
conflagration, which was only checked by the high- 
way that bounded the farther side of the moun- 
tain. I remember the event. For many days the 
mountain-top was hidden in the dense yellow 
smoke of its burning woods ; and at night the 
scene was one of surpassing beauty and grandeur ! 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 259 

But when the rain came the smoke cleared away ; 
and the once green summit of Porcupine was a 
mass of blackened rock, thickset with bristling 
spars of charred, fire-scarred forest- trees — a giant 
Porcupine in truth. 

What a bleak spot is this crest of Porcupine, 
when 

"Winter's recreant sun its span 
Has measured on the hills." 

What cold icy winds, snow-laden, leap from the 
New Hampshire Hills across the wide valley to 
this sharp peak in the deep of winter, to swoop 
down upon the hamlet at its foot ; what blinding 
drifts of snow rush down its slippery sides into 
the narrow highways ; but in summer-time how 
hotly the blaze of August beats against its barren- 
ness ! It was not long before the mountain was 
covered from apex to base with a dwarf growth, 
and with it came the succulent blackberry. The 
burnt ground was a delightful feeding-place for 
this vine, and it grew and flourished as I never 
saw it grow and flourish elsewhere ; and what 
immense berries these vines brought forth ! It is 
not exaggerating to say they were some of them 
of the size of one's thumb, — and a good-sized 
thumb at that ! I have never seen their like but 
once, and that was in the shadow of the old red 
mill at Jackson, New Hampshire. 

We generally waited until the district school 



26o BI^ACKBERRY-VINES. 

had closed, and then on some bright morning with 
shining tin-pails we would rendezvous at the house 
of some neighbor for the lads and lassies, a chosen 
few, and when the last straggler had come in the 
journey was begun mountainward. We were never 
in a hurry, as there was much to interest by the 
wayside, and we felt that three miles was quite a 
long distance at that age. 

Our way to the mountain lay over a beautiful 
stretch of road, a broad highwaj^ with pleasant 
outlooks, between many an ancient orchard and 
past many a quiet low-roofed farmhouse, with 
many a quaint and rambling characteristic, whose 
dwellers will point to the date upon some one of 
the posts in the spacious cellar, or upon some one 
of the stout pine rafters in the attic, as the evidence 
of the honorable antiquity of the roof-tree, the same 
being marked in durable red paint at the time of 
their building. They are as fully individual in their 
way as the scraggy apple-tree, that overhangs 
the turn of the carriage-way which leads one up 
to their hospitable doors. I never see the apple- 
tree but I think it the reproduction in Nature of 
the rugged, homely, honest settler who so many 
years ago blazed his way back from the sea-coast 
into the depths of the forest to make these inland 
farms for his descendants. I never see one of these 
old orchard-trees but I wish that I might count 
the rings of sap tissue that mark the building of 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 26 1 

its fibre into the broad-armed, gnarled, low- topped 
tree which has ever been the close companion of 
New England fann civilization. To think of this 
homely fruit-bearer is to dream of the homely life 
with which it was so closely associated. I am 
always wondering how old they are. Their speech 
to me is ever of far-away days. They are full of 
the romance of the Past. 

Just over the brow of the steep hill, that ends 
its long descent at the small stream which was 
always known as Great Brook, is a hamlet of a 
dozen or more houses nestled snugly together, one 
of which is of great age, and which was built by 
one of the early pioneers of the town whose ances- 
tor broke his way into these parts when it was a 
wilderness entire, with only his gun, his axe, and 
bag of provision slung to his back. Just over the 
stone- wall to the left is the clean, white boulder 
of granite beside which he built his first camp-fire, 
and where he spent his first night ; where a year 
later he built his log-cabin, and around which he 
began his first clearing, cutting the tall pines, 
burning ricks, sowing his rye, and bringing up his 
large family about him. He was a brave man, for 
I have read on the mossy tombstone that marks 
his resting-place this monograph, — "He was a 
Revolutionary soldier." The men of those days 
were of large, hardy manhood, and the wife was 
of equal womanly quality. 



262 BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 

Across the road to the left is the old oak post 
which carried the well-sweep for half a dozen 
generations, with its sides notched for climbing. 
Before it was set in place a hole was bored clear 
through its centre, filled with salt and tightly 
plugged, and so it stands to-day, Sphinx-like, with 
its century or more of secrets locked in its gray, 
weather-worn body. I have passed it many a 
night with a quick step. It seemed a ghost of 
bygone days standing there alone. 

Once across the threshold of some one of these 
farmhouses one gets glimpses, even in these broad 
times, of quaint home pictures, of people whose 
ways, like themselves, are colored with the nur- 
ture of far-off days, and to whom the outside world 
is much of a romance. To meet these simple- 
minded, single-hearted farm-folk by their own 
fireside, to sit at their humble board, to eat of 
their humble fare, and to bask in the glow of their 
blazing, old-fashioned hearth, is a rare pleasure in 
this selfish, hurrying world. It is an experience 
full of charm, and not without its lessons to the 
wordling. They are the wildflowers of humanity 
in all their purity of guise and perfume, and not 
less attractive in their homely setting. Their lin- 
tels, like those of the old Hebrew dwellers in 
Kgypt in the days of Moses, know no pestilence 
of dishonesty and falsehood, no unrest of insatiable 
desire or oppressions of heartless men. The tides 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 263 

that surge so tumultuously up and aown the 
highways where men push for a chance in the 
world's lottery pass over these homes with silent 
footsteps. 

Clinging devoutly to the traditions of earlier 
days, they read of railroads, of telegraphs, and tele- 
phones, of great cities with their immense popu- 
lations, their boundless wealth and wickedness, 
not the less thankful for the comfort and privacy 
of the snug farmhouse, its simple wants, its homely 
thrift, and its nearness to Nature. Farm people 
are Nature's children, only they are gifted with 
intellect. Nature has no more devout admirers. 
They go to Nature's school every day, and Nature 
paints for them many a beautiful picture of spring- 
time sowing and of jocund summer, of fragrant 
mowing-fields and brown harvestings ; many a 
picture of sun and storm, of clearing skies and 
ruddy sunsets. The alchemy of Nature teaches 
them many a secret the world would like to know 
of insect habit, of bird life, and woodland lore. 
Not every tiller of the soil is a lout or bumpkin, 
but far from it, nor is farm life all of toil. It has 
the rich compensation of pastoral beauty and sim- 
plicity which lends to its living an indescribable 
charm. 

A few years hence, and the old ways will have 
been obliterated. The ample fireplaces will have 
been "bricked up," and the time-honored crane 



264 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

will have found its way into the cart of the old- 
junk man. Its associations will have grown to 
the dignity of legends such as Hawthorne tells to 
children in his "Tanglewood Tales." This smooth 
turnpike of to-day offers no suggestion of the times 
when it was but a narrow trail through the thick 
woods, a horse-path over which the settler, follow- 
ing the backbone or spine of the ridge, Vi^ent to 
mill with his corn and barley grist. In those 
days the grist-mill was often miles away, and to 
reach it was a tedious undertaking. It was a 
day's journey 

"To go and another to come." 

The rude church upon the hill which overlooked 
an unbroken sea of forest was reached in like 
manner, goodman and dame riding the same steed ; 
for many a year of backwoods life elapsed before 
the lumbering, springless wagon was used by 
even the more well-to-do farmer. A light Brew- 
ster has just passed me along this self-same road 
of boyhood, leaving behind its white line of slow- 
settling dust as it disappears over the knoll by 
the old well-sweep. The heavy thoroughbrace 
was good enough for sensible folk in those days 
when lumber was cheap and plenty. Those were 
solid times of good stout cow-hide boots for the 
girls, and of leathern bags for the grist, — da5's 
of good digestions, of devout and respectful and 



BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 265 

respectable manners, when the school children 
always doffed cap and bonnet with marked defer- 
ence to pastor and teacher, when things were 
made to last 

"A hundred years to a day;" 

and so they have lasted, clock, spinning-wheel, and 
loom, to the great gratification of many people 
who once had ancestors. As for the people who 
never had any ancestry, an old clock in the hall- 
way or a flax-wheel in the parlor stands for some- 
thing ; if they are not heirlooms, their possession 
shows extremely good taste. I think it a good 
sign that so much interest should be taken in 
these relics and homely reminders of "ye olden 
times" when our granddams spun, knit, and wove 
the apparel for the household. They at least 
afford hvely suggestion to the race of dawdlers. 

I very much doubt if anybody with Yankee 
blood in his veins can ever become the society 
dawdler our novehsts are so fond of serving up 
in black and white for the delectation of their 
pessimist readers, — such as Howells and James 
so aptly sketch with a free hand; but I 
have an impression that a six months' appren- 
ticeship to farm-life would eradicate the disease 
even in its worst stages. I am a believer in the 
Antsean theory, that men gain strength by their 
contact with the earth. Dirt is a great healer, a 



266 BI,ACKBERRY-VINES. 

great health-giver, as many a child knows as he 
recalls his pie-making days. It is the base of any 
great democracy and an admirable leveller of class 
distinctions. This repugnance on the part of some 
people to own their plebeian ancestry is a human 
weakness which honest people despise and avoid ; 
for if there is anything of which an American 
ought to be proud it is his democratic descent, his 
plebeian independence. One's forefathers may not 
have been voyagers in the Mayflower, or have 
stood among the ' ' embattled farmers ' ' of Concord, 
or have had a hand in the drafting of the Consti- 
tution ; but I have no doubt that in some humble 
way they served the common cause. It is enough 
to be of American birth in these days of grow- 
ing civilization. 

The outlook from this knoll shows many a broad 
rood of orchard and sloping farm-land, with the 
quiet, elm-shadowed hamlet just below, the gray 
roofs and red chimneys of which show through 
the broken masses of scarlet maple and yellow- 
ing elm with kindly greeting. Past the grocery, 
with its sagging ridgepole and its post-ofiice sign, 
with its insignia of weather-worn antiquity, and 
farther down the long hill, is a group of rustic 
road-builders with ploughs, carts, and oxen. Road- 
building in the country is a simple matter. The 
expenditure is a limited one, and there are no 
rapacious aldermen, no committees on streets, to 
be approached with delicacy. 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 26/ 

Haying is over ; the uplands were shorn of their 
blossoms a month ago, and the fragrance of the 
meadows has been stowed away upon the barn- 
scaflFolding for winter tid-bits for the cows and 
calves ; and how eagerly will they reach out for 
the juicy blue-joint and herdsgrass as the farmer 
pushes the meadow-grass by their noses along the 
barn floor ! What sweet breaths these coaxing 
cattle have as they stretch their necks over the 
low rail in mute appeal. But how eloquent was 
that appeal ! I could never refuse it, and what 
good friends we were in those days ! What friend- 
ships of barnyard and pasture-side we made as 
the huge forkfuls of yellow straw and corn-butts 
went out of the barn into its narrow, sunny yard, 
and under its sheds for the cattle to munch while 
they took their daily airing in the snowy, bluster- 
ing winter weather. How warmty the midday 
sun shone out of the south when the melted snow 
along the roof of the barn came dripping down, 
hardening into long, shapely icicles as the afternoon 
grew, cooler, grayer, and shorter with the sundown ! 

But our farmer has turned road-builder, and 
has begun his fall instalment of tax-paying labor 
upon the highways. Country highways are ever 
characteristic of the road-surveyor regnant. They 
abound in human traits, rough, hubbly, and full 
of inequalities, or smooth and well-ballasted, like 
the men who build them. Woe to the traveller's 



268 BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 

comfort when the road-surveyor is a man with a 
hobby ! He will invariably plough up the best 
bit of road in his district, if only to demonstrate 
his incapacity and the inutility of his ideas. All 
taxes are come to be grievous and irksome since 
the days of the Boston Tea Party, but of all such 
levyings the road-tax arouses least of adverse 
criticism. In many road- districts this working 
out of the highway tax is a mere form or sem- 
blance of labor, — a sort of animated loafing for 
three or four daj'S, when the obligation is well 
cancelled on the surveyor's book, — so much for 
oxen, so much for cart and ploughs, and so much 
for man. These are notable days in the farm 
calendar, the only days in the year when a boy's 
work commands a man's pay. It is more often a 
farce than a conscientious effort. 

What a still da}^, and yet what a fresh, bright 
atmosphere lies over the hills ! The birds scour 
the roadsides before us in troops, — sparrows, 
robins, now and then a stray sap-sucker or crimson 
crested woodpecker, with hosts of thistle-birds to 
keep them company. The noisy chatter and song 
of the earlier summer-time are hushed and sub- 
dued. The road-builders accost us as we pass 
them, no doubt thinking all the time of their own 
childhood and its barrenness. These fields were 
young and of smaller area when they were boys, 
when there was less of romping and more of denial ; 



BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 269 

but how stoutly the oxen pull the great breaking- 
up plough through the solid road as the furrow- 
breaks crumbling from its burnished share ! Some 
of the larger boys, who are levelling the dirt with 
their shining hoe-blades, look after us with wistful 
glance as we scamper down the hill to the bridge, 
chasing the birds that lead us with swift wing, 
diving into the shadows of the birches or exploring 
the depths of the hardback, which is still in bloom ; 
and what perfectly formed spikes of pink color 
they flaunt above the walls ! The roadside blooms 
all the summer long. The swamp-roses, or, as we 
used to call them, the pond-roses, are abundant, 
overtopping the tallest rails of the fences. A 
spray of golden-rod throws its brightness against 
the ripening foliage of the hedge ; and what a 
sharp contrast of lively yellow it makes ! The 
buttercups and white ox-eyes linger in the shadows 
of the trees and of the pine woods, where a drum- 
ming partridge is beating the long-roll with his 
wings, and with its murmuring sound comes the 
singing of the waters of Great Brook, — always 
the great trouting-stream of the section. 

Most of the streams back among the hills get 
low in midsummer, and though they are shrunken, 
many of them, into mere runlets, yet to me they 
sing as merrily in their poverty as when the melt- 
ing snows and fall rains have swollen them to the 
tops of their banks, when everything goes by you 



270 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

with a rush and a tumultuous roar. But Great 
Brook is the natural outlet of the broad basin, 
known far and wide as College Swamp, — an unfa- 
miliar place to most people, a dense wilderness, in 
fact, where only an enthusiastic angler would think 
of going, and its waters do not ruffer much dimi- 
nution except in drouth. I think the rippling 
shallows in the hot days of August far more musi- 
cal than the turbid currents of the earlier spring- 
time, lyooking from the crooked hemlock rail at 
the side of the bridge, down upon the stony path- 
way of this stream, brown and smooth or covered 
with dark-hued mosses trailing with the limpid 
waters that go pattering down the narrow lanes 
between the glistening boulders, shooting across 
the white, slippery ledges with broad rushing foot- 
steps as they hurry past the broken slopes of Green- 
leaf's pasture, one wonders if there is much differ- 
ence between this brook and the one which ran by 

"Philip's farm, where brook and river meet." 

I feel that my brook is not the less beautiful, 
and I apprehend that its song is much the same as 
that one which Tennyson so beautifully translates : 

"I chatter over stony ways 
In little sharps and trebles, 
I bubble into eddying bays, 
I babble on the pebbles. 



BLACKBERRY-VINES. 2/1 

" With many a curve my banks I fret 
By many a field and fallow, 
And many a fairy foreland set 
With willow-weed and mallow. 

"I chatter, chatter as I flow 
To join the brimming river. 
For men may come and men may go, 
But I go on forever. 

"I wind about and in and out, 
With here a blossom sailing. 
And here and there a lusty trout, 
And here and there a grayling. 

"And here and there a foamy flake 
Upon me as I travel, 
With many a silvery waterbreak 
Above the golden gravel. 

"And draw them all along, and flow 
To join the brimming river, 
For men may come and men may go, 
But I go on forever." 

Instead of willow- weed and mallow, here are 
thick-growing margins of white, feathery alder, 
and mid-stream are stately clusters of the cardinal- 
flower, bright like bits of bursting flame ; among 
the more sober hues of the unkempt pasture is the 
delicately colored iris, and for the grayling are 
the silvery chub and the shimmering scales of the 
voracious pickerel. Beside the brook are square 



2/2 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

rods of the bright green Indian-poke, and in the 
moist places the yellow flower of the tall-stalked 
elecampane looks down upon its more humble 
brother, with more of pity than disdain as it seems 
to me. 



II. 



This valley seems very narrow when the mists 
shut down over the wood, barring out the farm- 
house up the road a bit, but the atmosphere is dry, 
and there are no damp, drizzling fogs from the 
sea to blur the beautiful picture of the wood and 
sky. What temptations lie in these sparkling 
waters, and yielding to them, we, childlike, have 
left the highway, and with shoes and stockings 
high and dry on the bank, are soon wading about 
the brook with all the abandon of childhood. I 
have no doubt had Birket Foster set eyes upon us, 
he would have made that day immortal to us, so 
far as his art could have lent its aid. Tlie world 
of sky, of teeming earth, seemed to be perfection. 
I do not think a shadow of a thought came across 
our minds other than that we were to get home 
with the nightfall. How few have been such days 
since we have grown larger in years and stature, 
but the compensation of these later years is an un- 
told one in its wealth of friendships and increased 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 2/3 

intelligence, its broad outlooks, and in its con- 
summations. 

Opposite the scene of our wayside frolic was a 
steep bank of reddish-colored clay-and-loam mix- 
ture, and a few inches below its grass top were 
numerous round holes all arow, the homes of the 
sand-martins or bank-swallows. There are plenty 
of martins, and they are continually dodging in 
and out these tiny doorways ; and what swift- 
winged fellows, as they circle about us, keeping 
up a constant whistling, their purplish coats glis- 
tening in the sun ! One by one they fly into these 
holes, and not a sand-martin is in sight ; a few 
moments later, and all are out again scouring the 
tops of the iDUshes up and down stream, chasing 
such insects as attract their attention. The nests 
of these birds are the safest from depredation of 
any that I know. They are curious structures, 
these nests in the meadow-banks by the brooks, 
for this outer entrance leads oftentimes by a wind- 
ing gallery of considerable length to, as Dr. 
Brewer says, "a small spherical apartment, on 
the floor of which they form a rude nest of straw 
and feathers." They are but another illustration 
of the rare intelligence with which God has en- 
dowed many of his creatures. 

Just below the turn in the brook is "Tinker's 
Dam," an antiquated and much dilapidated wooden 
flume which was erected years ago, when men had 



274 BIvACKBERRY- VINES. 

the mania for building saw-mills. It went by the 
name of "Thurston's Folly" for years, and was a 
mark for many a rustic witticism. There was 
hardly a stream in the town which had not a 
mill of some sort, the shingle-mill being most in 
vogue, and a third of the year was the most they 
could be utilized ; but shingles must be had, and 
at those seasons of the year when water was 
plenty there was not much else to do, so it came 
about that this flume was set and a dam begun 
which was never finished. What glorious visions 
once floated through the brain of its projector of 
whirring mill-wheels, of busy, thriving hives of 
industry, and of inrolling wealth ! what dreams of 
restless trade and thronging crowds had peopled 
this hollow in the woods none knew but himself 
The dam was never completed, but ever since then 
the water has poured through its flume in drouth 
and freshet in noisy contempt of this nondescript 
enterprise. The old shingle-mill which once stood 
above the bridge, the rotten timbers of which strew 
the pasture-side, had sawed many a thousand of 
pumpkin-pine shingles for primitive house and 
barn, but when it had outlived its usefulness it 
was given over to decay. The old mill is gone, 
but the "Folly" remains. 

There is a great deal of human nature invested 
in these silent landmarks of events. This old 
tumble-down flume has taught many a passer by, 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 275 

who knew its story, a worthy and no doubt lasting 
lesson. It is one of the unlettered sign-boards, 
the like of which exists doubtless in many a coun- 
try town whose traditions reach back to the begin- 
ning of the present century. 

But leaving the rollicking brook with its alders, 
its flaming cardinal-blossoms, its swallows and its 
* ' devil' s - darning - needles , ' ' dragon-flies , hovering 
motionless over the brown shallows, and donning 
our shoes, we trudge up the steep hill which forms 
the outer lower base of Porcupine. The sun is 
well up, and the mulleins by the road look dry and 
tired of holding their yellow flowers so straightly 
and stiffly up ; but with a drink from the watering- 
trough under the apple-trees we keep straight up 
the highway to the mountain. The higher up 
we get the more abundant the indications of the 
blackbeny, high-bush as well as creeper. 

The two species common to Maine hillsides are 
the Rubus villosjis, or the high-bush, and the R. 
Canadensis, or running blackberry. This creeper 
is abundant among the rocks by the side of the 
highway. It is a dear lover of sunshine. Flower- 
ing in June, it covers the ground with its patches 
of snow-white color, almost odorless, though so 
beautiful. When a boy how eagerly I watched 
the slow transformation of these blossoms into 
fruitage as I trudged to the brick school-house, 
and as I went to the pasture for the cows through 



2/6 BLACKBERRY- VINES. 

the midsummer. Just below the farmhouse, half- 
way to the pasture-bars, and just within the after- 
noon shadows of a dwarf pine, was a tangle of 
these vagabondish vines ; and what savage, needle- 
pointed spines grew along their slender lengths, 
and how they stung me as I robbed them of their 
dainty treasure ! This species was well scattered 
about the farm along the hedges, romping in the 
sunshine over the ledges among the spiderwort 
and leatherleaf, clambering over the fences and 
stumps, not disdaining the company of the purple 
pigeon-berry and the high-bush blueberry. These 
vines take on charming colors of purple, scarlet, 
and bronze as the summer advances, and their 
favorite haunts about the old home-place were 
along an ancient half-wall topped off with a half- 
rail fence, — two pine rails rived and set into mor- 
tised posts, and which bounded the ten-acre lot 
just above the county road. These pine rails had 
grown gray with age, and were covered here and 
there with shields of vari-colored lichens, the most 
beautiful of which were the Parmelia pallesce7is. 
This fence was the rendezvous of the robins and 
3'ellow-birds, and in cherry-time, of the cedar or 
cherry-birds as well, where they held their morn- 
ing and afternoon assemblies, discussing matters 
with many a musical note. Flanking the upper 
edge of the half-wall, and along its margin at 
irregular intervals, were clumps of chokecherr}^ 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 277 

dwarf puckery fruit-bearers, an oak sapling or 
two, and nearer the house, growing in the throat 
of this rambhng line of cobble-stone, was a huge 
black cherry-tree that hung full of luscious fruit 
in August ; and it was just beyond its western 
shadow that I used to find the R. Canadensis in 
its perfection. These vines bore a large black, 
juicy fruit, and many a platter heaped with their 
dusky pulpiness found its way to the tea-table for 
the men as they came in from their work. How 
refreshing the coolness of these first blackberries 
of the season on a hot August afternoon, as they 
were brought up from the cool, breezy cellar- way ; 
but I found much of interest about this old wall 
besides running vines. I never saw anywhere 
else such huge caterpillar-nests as infested the 
tops of the bushes of the chokecherry. Some of 
them were nearly a yard across, and very much 
like bits of muslin they looked at a distance hung 
out to dry in the sun ; but they were doomed to 
annihilation. With the falling dew, these pests 
seek their nests, when, with coils of birch-bark 
three or four feet in length, with one end well 
ignited and blazing brightly, we went about the 
farm destroying every nest that we knew of 
When the nests were in the tops of the trees we 
thrust a long stick or pole into our coil of bark 
and thus hoisted our torches into the tops of the 
tallest limbs. Sometimes we made quite a torch- 



278 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

light procession in the orchard going from one 
tree to another. 

Along these half-sunken stones I found always 
beautiful lichens. Over some of the larger stones 
in the wall were fine specimens of the P. pallescens, 
light-hued, with different shades of olive and gray, 
and with more or less of rufous tint, — as beau- 
tiful as a flower, and as wonderfully made. Here 
is a bit of rotten limb which the wind has torn 
from the tall cherry-tree and thrown down into 
the damp shadow of the hedge. On its rough 
bark I find some specimens of the Claydonia 
pyxidata, and which grew, some of them, nearly an 
inch in height, with all their cup-shaped blossoms 
right side up to catch the stray dewdrops as they 
fall from the dripping leaves above them. In the 
moist hollows of this hedge, where the shadows 
lie deepest through the day, I frequently came 
across some very dainty specimens of the toad- 
stool, their tops wide-spread, umbrella-like ; and 
what thick, dainty-like ribs stretch outward from 
its slender stem ! I find some very large ones 
occasionally in the woods. A toad might keep 
his back well dry under one of them in a shower, 
spreading as they do some four or five inches across. 
I have often wondered where they got their deli- 
cate stainings of scarlet, which I have noticed so 
frequently marking their creamy tinted tops. It 
may be owing to some delicious beverage of the 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 279 

field or woods, the secret of which is withheld 
from their admirers ; but what topers they are 
along with the lichens, what hard drinkers from 
every rain ! 

But we have already mounted the easterly shoul- 
der of the Porcupine, and looking back can see the 
steep slopes which make the sides of the Great 
Brook Valley. Above the valley lies the ancient 
tree-embowered hamlet, and farther on is the lofty 
ridge of farming lands where runs the gray line of 
this half-wall of which I have been writing, with 
its thick hedge and wide, massy-topped cherry- 
tree, and just below, under the shadow of the 
elms, is the red-clapboarded side of the farmhouse 
peering through the dark-green foliage of the 
orchard- trees. Far away beyond all this stretches 
the valley seaward. How distinctly these objects 
answer the questioning of the vision, and how 
intimately do I know them every one. 

The R. villosus begins to greet us from the nooks 
and corners of the fences, but there is no delaying 
on our part, for we know they reach their greatest 
abundance and highest perfection among the fast- 
nesses of the hills, and along the rugged slopes of 
Porcupine especially. We keep sharp watch to 
the left for the old-time corduroy logging-road, 
which will take us comfortably over the swamp, 
which has pre-empted a good bit of acreage along 
the verge of this "lower outwork of the mountain, 



^mts^eaaa^isam 



28o BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 

and once well into this wood-road we find a re- 
newed exhilaration in the coolness of its shadows. 
How friendty-like the trees reach out their branches 
toward us with greeting of twig and leaf. The 
yellow birch, the beech, hemlock, and spruce are 
all here. Here is more poke-weed, and not far 
from it is a large cluster of flowering thorough- 
wort, its blossoms pure white, tinged with yellow 
slightly, which I have marked for my own on the 
return homeward. A decoction of thoroughwort 
and well-seasoned cider, fresh from the best barrel 
in the amply stored cellar, was the regulation 
spring drink of the farm household in those days. 
It was the appetite-builder of the season ; and 
plucking thoroughwort, like cutting hog-yokes, was 
to be done whenever and wherever we found it in 
bloom. We have found the Finch family and the 
warblers at home, and they make a continual con- 
cert among the evergreen tops. 

I discover a sound as of the humming of a swarm 
of bees. As I lag behind the humming grows 
louder, and sounds close by, as if there might be 
a stolen nest in some of these aged yellow birches 
that lean out over the path. It is the song of the 
honey-bee, for I have discovered several of them 
about the blossoms of the big-leaved moosewood. 
I say nothing to my comrades, but later in the 
season I will see what this noise means. With a 
bit of shingle, some honey or brown sugar, I will 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 2 8 1 

make these rovers among the autumn blossoms 
tell me where their home is. Along this moist 
land is a luxuriant undergrowth among the taller 
spruces and deciduous trees. The ground is over- 
run with snake-berry, partridge-plum, and hosts of 
other creepers, all carrying dark-green, waxy-look- 
ing leaves. One of these woodland vines bears a 
leaf the markings of which are much like those of 
the adder-snake. It is not common, though I have 
seen it in the Peabody valley when following its 
streams downward to the main tributary of the 
Androscoggin. 

When in the swamps I am always peering about 
to escape contact with the dogwood bush, some 
species of which are very poisonous. The itching, 
burning sensations of this poison at work on the 
hands or face are similar to those induced by 
the wax-leaved mercury, or poison ivy of the 
meadows and uplands. This species of ivy grows 
rankest in the swamps, but it delights as well in 
rambling lengths of tumble-down wall, often throw- 
ing its tendrils about some adjacent tree, its robust 
leaf looking out at you from its perch with blood- 
shot, baleful glance or with the glistening green 
eyes of some venomous reptile ! Contact with this 
vine is something to be dreaded by those to whom 
its touch is so malignant. When a child there was 
nothing in nature so dreaded by me as this vine. 
Not even the dirty-looking adder of the ledges, 



282 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

with his mottled markings of milk-white and drab, 
lying across my pathway in the field would arouse 
in me such feeling of revulsion, as this crimson- 
stemmed climber, the Rhus toxicodendron of the 
country-side. In some sections of New England 
it is not found as abundantly as in others. 

By a curious freak of favor it withholds its ma- 
lignancy from some, while to others it shows its 
invisible fangs at every turn. I ever gave the 
meadow haymow a wide berth in winter-time, as 
this vine stores its virus in the withered leaf with 
unabated power. Each leaf seems to be a storage 
battery of noxious vegetable matter. There was 
a patch of it by the old crumbling wall on the 
upper margin of the house-garden, and as I looked 
at it, passing to and from the field in childhood, 
it grew into one of those places which, like haunted 
houses, give one an indefinable sensation of chill. 
Had Hawthorne seen this spot of creeping vine 
through my eyes, he would have wrought it into 
the home of some mythical monster, such as that 
which Cadmus slew before he could build his city, 
whose glittering scales would have been all of bur- 
nished emerald. Here is abundance of the plant 
all about us. How it glares at us from the edges 
of the road ! but one of the boys plucks one of its 
slimy leaves, and slowly eats it, — ugh ! I thought 
ever after that, this boy would come to some bad 
end. It seemed for him to come off harmless, that 



BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 283 

only a compact with ' ' the Black Man ' ' could inter- 
vene. I have noticed since that he has not got on 
over- well in life. Some men carry the recklessness 
of their boyhood into maturer years, but it seldom 
harms others so much as themselves. It is a char- 
acteristic that bodes but little good to its possessor 
or to other people. 

The woods are full of sounds, of bird-note and 
song of hidden insect. I can hear distinctly above 
the other sounds the piping of the tiny red sala- 
mander, and it is very much like the note of the 
frog one hears in the marshes and lowlands. This 
little fellow sings till the frosts come, and if you 
are fortunate enough you will find him under 
some mossy rock or stump in the wet places in 
the woods. Mr. Burroughs details an interesting 
search of his for this tiny lizard. The rocks about 
the springs and wet runs in the forest are the fa- 
vorite resorts of the Lizard family. I have spent 
many a half-hour turning up these wet, slippery 
stones to see what sort of creatures I could find 
beneath them. Oftentimes I would find two or 
three of the lizard tribe, each belonging to a dif- 
ferent family, under the same stone ; and what 
beautiful creeping things they were ! and how 
graceful and agile in their movements, — the red 
and brown newts in particular ! The most striking 
of all the Salamander family was that one whose 
coat was of shiny black, ornamented with bright 



284 BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 

golden spots such as one finds on the carapax of 
the young tortoise in the early summer, in the 
muddy bottoms of the inland brooks and rivers. 

How much there is to see ; but emerging from 
this thin belt of woods, we are on the blackberry 
ground. In the openings among the boulders, — 
and how beautifully these boulders are colored ! 
— intermingled with the stalwart high-bush, are 
the tall, flaming stalks of the Hieracif alius, the 
fire-weed of the burnt lands ; and with every puff 
of wind its downy seeds go sailing down the hill- 
side over the tree-tops into the valley. But what 
cordons of vines, bending low with their dusky 
fruitage, hem us in ! The successful gatherer of 
berries must needs be a silent body, and not of 
too restless disposition. The rover never finds the 
largest, juiciest fruit, but overleaps it in his haste. 
The pail does not fill with gadding from this to 
that, but rather by the aid of its owner, who knows 
instinctively when* he is best off. We had gradually 
filled our pails with rounding measure, and putting 
them within the shadow of a clump of maples, and 
covering them well over with our jackets, we made 
the ascent to the summit of the hill ; and once 
there, what a wealth of midsummer splendor broke 
upon the vision ! Summer was in its full fruitage. 
It was too early for the hazy mists which will gild 
the jutting hills and woodlands a month later with 
their dream of golden glory. The sky is as pas- 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 285 

sionless, as blue and calm, as in the flush of June, 
and the woods and fields are not less verdant. 
A cool wind blowing over the summit tempers the 
heat and adds to the charm. What a mosaic of 
Nature's making lies at my feet ! There is no 
withholding of her picturesque bounty. The day 
is perfection. I have listened to many a sermon 
from the pulpit in which the Preacher assumed 
that the Deity was not able to speak for himself, 
but this sermon written upon the face of the earth 
by the Deity's own hand counted for as much 
with me as all that had gone before or any that 
have come after. Emerson translated something 
of the divine truth that lives throughout Nature 
when he wrote, "It seems as if the day were not 
wholl}' profane in which we have given heed to 
some natural object." Men cannot add to the 
teachings of Nature, to " the music and pictures 
of the most ancient religion." They may study 
her in her many moods, and tell to others what 
they have discovered ; and j^et Nature is indiffer- 
ent to all they may say or do. Her laws are higher 
than the laws of men ; and, better than mankind, 
her obedience is to her Creator. Her instincts are 
often superior to man's intelligence, and before her 
power man is but a pygmy. Her warnings to tres- 
passers are alwa5^s up, always legible, and the 
delinquent ever pays the penalty of his negligence. 
She is inexorable ; • more relentless in the enforce- 



286 BLACKBERRY-VINES. 

nient of her decrees than ever Draco was. She 
Hstens to no arguments ; she is deaf to entreaty, 
lyike the silent knife of the guillotine her blows 
fall with unexpected suddenness ; but for every 
poison she has an antidote, but men must search it 
out, and the door to her laboratory is ever open. 
Silent, grand, and beautiful through the centuries, 
she is the exponent of Deity, the Universal law, 
the Living Force ; she is the animated expression 
of a Divine principle, however men may choose to 
name it. 

This picture is too broad in its composition for 
its beauty to be appreciated at a sweeping, single 
glance. I close my hands, and so look through 
them from one point to another ; and how readily 
these hills and valleys, with their uplands, mead- 
ows, and woodlands, are focused into individual 
pictures which men try so hard to paint ! What 
bits of perfect color ! What charm of outline, of 
lights and shadows, of tone and crispness ! Just 
look with me from this landmark of my childhood. 
It is a wonderful harmony in colors, and its nearer 
aspect reminds me much of Sontag, with whose 
pictures I became acquainted later in life, — his 
mountain subjects, so ragged and unkempt are 
these huge agglomerations of rock, with their hosts 
of smooth, weather-worn, bark-denuded trees, their 
streams far down, gleaming like bits of«turquoise 
through the openings in the trees, with their azure 



BLACKBERRY-VINKS. 287 

depths of deepening shadow, and over all their 
brilliant canopy of sky. It is the same picture in 
parts that I have before seen from the square bel- 
fry of the old white meeting-house to the northeast, 
and which has for more than half a century topped 
the rounded dome of its swelling ridge of farming 
lands, — no doubt of the same kin as this sharp 
peak upon which the blackberries grew so luxu- 
riantly. I well remember my sensations of won- 
dering delight upon looking out over this boundary 
sea of verdure, its far-off shores losing themselves 
everj^where in the hazy indistinctness of horizon 
outline. Troops of swallows circled about the 
outer railing, through which the winds whistled 
weirdly, and I seemed to be on the very tip-top of 
the world ; and so to my boyish eyes it seemed as 
I stood on the topmost crest of Porcupine. I could 
count a dozen lakes, half as many streams, and 
innumerable farms, and away to the southward 
what seemed to be the ocean stretched its dark-blue 
length along the rim of distant woods. Westward 
the White Hills lifted their lofty crests to the sky ; 
wide wastes of woodland lay between, that reached 
around to the northward beyond the Waterford 
highlands, their broken slopes marked with white 
streaks, where the winter snows had sped down- 
ward with their avalanches of loosened rock and 
ice. Southward, two lengthening chains of silver 
narrowed out between the brown ridges, and to the 



288 BLACKBBRRY-VINES. 

eastward, over the levels of plains-lands, beyond 
Thompson's Pond, hung a low trail of smoke above 
the iron highway from the Atlantic to the Great 
West. White, dusty roads, glimpses of solitary 
teams, of lonely farmhouses, whose isolated smokes 
curled slowly upward until they met the currents 
of the winds, of dark-foliaged orchards and bright 
yellow stubble-lands, of quiet hamlet, of larger 
village, and slender church-spire, make up the rest 
of this magnificent panorama of the hills. 

One feels much the same way as he looks over 
his paper at the breakfast-table. I forgot the tedi- 
ousness of the climb up Porcupine in the enchant- 
ment of scenery below and about me, so I forget 
the mechanical process which gives me the sen- 
tient newsmonger beside my plate, and which puts 
me upon the topmost pinnacle of intelligence. The 
outlook of my double-sheet paper is like a huge 
lens, the diameter of which equals that of the 
globe itself, and within the periphery of which is 
spread out the map of the world whose people 
speak to me in my own tongue, and over my own 
threshold. It is wonderful how near the stars men 
may live, and yet walk the earth. How the imagi- 
nation comes into play, with so much of Nature's 
aid ; for as I look, the farm-lands are covered with 
their primitive forests, and I can mark the trail 
over which the early settler of this beautiful inland 
town came within its borders ; and what a misty 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 289 

trail it is ! I can see the smoke of his first camp- 
fire, and how lazy-hke it drifts over the virgin 
woods. 

The shrill whistle of a stray chipmunk arouses 
me from my dream-idyl in this wild retreat of the 
hills, and glancing sharply around I see him run- 
ning swiftly along a fallen tree. If it were not so 
late in the season I should suspect him of being 
out on some pilfering expedition against the birds. 

The squirrels have Epicurean appetites ; bird's 
eggs and fledglings are tid-bits for which they are 
ever in search. From the birches below a robin 
whistles, "Tut-tut, tut-tut ! " in a sharp, scolding 
tone, as if to reprove my striped neighbor for 
disturbing the silence of this mountain seclusion. 
How swiftly the midday has gone ; but I am in a 
charmed realm. Far below, the valley skirts the 
base of Porcupine, where trailing down its w^ooded 
length is a low brooding mist of thinnest blue. 
Here and there are wide, jutting spurs and broad 
shelves of rock half-hidden by their leafy coverts, 
the eternal ledges looking lonelier and more bare, 
with only a scattering group of pines, wind-blown 
and storm-beaten, to keep them speechless com- 
pany ; but the pine is never speechless, never 
without its musical, soughing song. The stalwart 
pine is the monarch of the forests, but along the 
barren slopes and rocky mountain-sides it becomes 
the sentinel tree, the guardian-spirit personified. 



290 BIvACKBERRY-VINES. 

But what slow change is this that has come over 
the sky with the waning afternoon ! Its pale blue 
has warmed into transparent amber ; white, massy- 
cumuli are filling the west, and the wind comes 
in cooler, stronger gusts. The sun is weaving 
shadows, with silence shod, along the margins of 
the woods, and in the depressions among the 
rocks. The landscape is growing imperceptibly 
gray. Its outlines grow soft, and the farther hills 
are slowly losing their individuality, merging into 
oneness, — a shimmering line of undulating hori- 
zon. The distant, low-down tops of the woods 
look like the far-off sea, blue, level, and boundless ; 
and beyond all, the narrow streak of ochre-stained 
sky has the semblance of a bar of gleaming sand. 
From behind the western mountains, — 

"Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmer- 
ing band 

Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to 
the folds of the land. 

Inward and outward, to northward and southward, the 
beach lines linger and curl, 

As a silver wrought garment that clings to and follows 
the firm, sweet lines of a girl. 

Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight, 

Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim, gray loop- 
ing of light." 

It is not difficult to conjure the early rising mists 
into the sails of phantom vessels as they follow the 
trail of the river up its hidden slopes to meet the 



BLACKBERRY- VINES. 29 1 

cool breeze that is to build them into the crimson 
clouds of sunset. There is a fleet of these phan- 
tom sails coming up from the south that have left 
the sea hours ago, and how leisurely they drift 
over the emerald floors of the illimitable woods. 

I^ittle by little the silence is lost. The tree-toad 
has found his way up here among these decaying 
stumps, and has opened his mouth for a trill, as 
his house gets out of the line of the sun and into 
the shadow. A red-crested woodpecker has begun 
his tattoo upon one of the tall dead trees below 
me, and among their undergrowth the dwarf maples 
and wild-cherry, — the beautiful sumac being in 
like abundance, — I hear the soft twittering of the 
song-sparrow, and my robin has begun his ringing 
notes, — the overshot threads of sound in this med- 
ley web of music. Along the highway, far down 
the hill, some one is singing a stanza from an old 
hymn. I catch the last two lines, — 

"He plants his footsteps in the sea, 
And rides upon the storm." 

How clearly these sounds climb the steeps of the 
mountain, and with them I hear the noisy rattle 
of wheels over the stony ruts and outcropping 
ledges of this road ; but it is time to think of 
home-going. Down through the yellow brakes, 
through thick tangles of fallen tree-top and flaunt- 
ing fireweed, breaking many a silvery, invisible 
barrier of spider's subtile weaving stretched across 



292 BLACKBERRY-VINBS. 

our way, leaping, slipping, and tumbling over one 
obstacle after another, we go to our pails, which 
we find undisturbed, and are soon in the logging- 
road. My honey-bees are silent, but my blos- 
soming thorough wort is not forgotten, and I 
have plucked it on my way to the road. What 
tired, hungry children we were, and how prosaic 
the highway after the outlook of the mountain ! 
What appetites were ours in those days, when 
every wind that blew brought its fill of zest ! Our 
progress homeward is a silent trudge, but the pic- 
tures of those blackberrying days can never be for- 
gotten ; and what golden treasures they are ! What 
halcyon thoughts does the aforetime country urchin 
cherish of birds in air, of flowering uplands and 
meadow brooks, of breezy hill-tops, of smoking 
ricks and fragrant clover- swaths new-mown, of 
June, and of October woods v>^ith their yellow 
mists, of hooded Indian summer and bare Novem- 
ber, gray with lowering skies and spitting snows, 
and of homely country by-ways. Life is the better, 
purer, and more hopeful for every boyish tramp 
of ours. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

016 256 136 4 # , 



.■>»■- 






